A Review and Response to The Jacobin's Christian Socialism

Annie Levin's Jacobin profile of the religious leftist organization The Institute for Christian Socialism makes some dangerous assumptions about the role of faith in politics.

The title for this article, “The Institute for Christian Socialism Wants to Bring Left Politics to American Christianity,” starts off with a false equivalency between evangelical Christianity and Christianity as a whole, citing the well-known rise of rightwing moral panic in the 70s as a setup for the central conceit of the article: that left-wing politics are left out of mainstream Christian discourse in the United States. At the onset, the argument is flawed: overall, non-right ideologies are as represented in Christianity as much as they are anywhere else, so there is no need for any kind of correction. The cynical exploitation of religious thinking and its irrationality by a minority of so-called Christians does establish anything about the prevalence of leftist thinking within each sect, nor even within the compartmentalized and incongruous brains of those who claim to be Christians, whose cognitive dissonance and capriciousness of belief are a direct result of the mystical nature of their thought processes. The Christian right is a shaky enough concept, let alone Christian left, because Christian-anything is an inherently fleeting designation. That it is more easily exploited by well-funded right-wing propagandists is an argument for the abandonment of religion as a possible rhetorical ally, not necessarily an argument for attempting to exploit it from the left, which is inescapably just as cynical and disrespectful as exploiting it from the right.

Assuming regardless that there is a case to be made for the empowerment of Christian socialism in the US, the argument Levin raises boils down to the following statement:

But the American Christian religious left has been organizationally homeless for many years, and their religion has become fused with reactionary right-wing politics. The religious right has gone about this project by building well-financed religious institutions with deep ties to conservative politics.

Nothing remotely like this infrastructure exists for the Left. Due to a lack of institutional support and years of distancing from churches and churchgoing communities, socialists have cut themselves off from historically some of the strongest, best organized, and most passionate movement builders out there.

At first glance, this is another in a series of self-recriminations the left periodically undergoes, often characterized by thoughts such as “if only we had been more polite,” or “if only we had compromised our values more thoroughly.” The first main argument here concerns something called “whole worker organizing,” essentially the idea that leftist movements have thus far unfairly demanded their members compartmentalize themselves by discouraging the mixing of religion and politics within these groups:

This way of thinking, common enough in successful union drives, is curiously absent in much of the grassroots socialist left. The vast majority of leftists are secular, and it is something of an unspoken dictum among committed socialist organizers that your religion, alongside so much of what makes organizers rich and interesting human beings, must be put to one side in the struggle to build a better world.

This leads to “burnout”: “The pool of organizers shrinks as people are forced to return to the things that constitute the rest of their lives: children, jobs, families, food, art, and love.” Leaving aside the oddness of including religion alongside food and love, and assuming both that this is true of leftist movements on the whole and significantly damaging to them (neither of which the author has established), all mass movements claiming to represent a diverse, representative group will contain multitudes who must to some degree set aside their differences in order to function as a unit. If Christian leftists cannot, for example, get along with Christian Jews or Christian atheists, why would these other groups not demand they exit, rather than placate their intractability? If religious belief is comparable to food preferences, to take one of the author’s examples, the problem is worse: a would-be Christian socialist who washes out of the movement would be no better than a steak-loving socialist who refuses to attend a meeting because the menu was vegetarian. If religion is such an important part of each members’ identity that they cannot briefly set it aside in order to take part in a pluralistic movement, then no coherent movement can exist regardless of its mandated tolerance of any particular creed, and religion must still vanish from public life for there to be any kind of unity.

Would we welcome in our midst a (for our purposes genuinely) socialist white supremacist? Would it matter whether their white supremacy was somehow the foundation of their socialist ideology or rather incidental to it, and something that we would hope to drum out of them at a later time? Does the act of compromise with something that ought to be anathema to socialist thinking, such as the intrusion of private religious beliefs into the political sphere, do damage to the party or to the consistency and applicability of its very socialist designation? We would not recriminate a leftist group for requesting its white supremacist members keep their beliefs separate from their participation, but we would recriminate them for allowing a known racist into their ranks.

The article is mainly a history and profile of leftist religious movements, less so a conclusive argument for the mixing of public and private life. Still, the following history is commonly cited by religionists as a justification for the inclusion of Christianity in leftist organizing:

The “base” in base communities refers to the social location of participants: they are typically exploited workers. These groups gained popularity in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the US-endorsed dictatorships throughout Latin America made it difficult and dangerous for groups to meet outside of religious meetings. Under brutal dictatorships in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Brazil, base communities became some of the only places where workers could convene safely. Across Latin America, members of base communities — rural peasants, urban slum dwellers, and poor workers — participated in revolutionary activities. Many were violently repressed by vicious regimes.

The association of churches and religious groups to leftist movements was a marriage of convenience and nothing inherent or unique to their religiosity. If the oppressive regimes had instead allowed model train hobbyist groups to meet with comparable freedom, then those organizations would now be held up as underexplored potentially socialist allies. Socialist organizing can be found anywhere in the present, especially in a society that is marginally less repressive than the regimes Levin mentions above. We now have no need for secrecy; the need for operational security and clarity of purpose are now far more important as the very planet careens into uninhabitability. Socialists have no inherent need for church or religion now, even if they once did out of safety concerns, and would be just as helpfully served by meeting at pubs or parks. Yet the author continues to assume that we need them rather than the other way around, accusing the left of antagonizing their religious members by asking them to periodically compartmentalize their belief (something they already do all day, when they operate a phone or do basic math):

Given that ICS members often feel alienated by their faith communities as well as leftist communities, they hope to put an end to the antagonism toward religion in socialist circles.

“The Left itself is really bad at engaging Christians,” said Joshua Davis. Given the immense power inherent in churches, by disengaging from religious people the Left is ignoring an enormous source of energy.

This statement is an apt summation of the problem with religious thinking, and it echoes the complaints right-wingers often have about the left: that we are not polite enough, and if we only couched our language in more overtly conciliatory tones, they would happily treat us with respect. This is in reality a rhetorical hostage situation in which we need to ask ourselves why the religious right has so dominated American Christianity—the answer has to do with the uniquely exploitable aspect of religious thinking, not the left’s rejection of it. This argument is best understood as a form of tacky victim-blaming or bullying, as it rests the assumption that all the responsibility for making concessions rests on those least able to make them. If the religious are not required to do anything to make interacting with secularists possible, why are secularists? We are all secular in some way; we are not all religious.

I have written previously of the damage done by the intrusion of religion into the public sphere and found that even “good” religious justification for a political position is poisonous and should be rejected entirely, most recently in my analysis of the recent spate of far-right activist decisions by the Supreme Court, finding that its nonsensical and non-reciprocal (not everyone shares the same exact religious beliefs, which is a problem when reaching a consensus on some kind of law or policy which will limit the rights of others which is based upon an unprovable, unfalsifiable, indeed inarguable ideology) nature is inherently damning to not only putatively leftist positions but to every position, even overtly realpolitik ones:

Allowing healthcare workers to exempt themselves from vaccination not only needlessly complicates the administering of public health mandates, it cheapens accessibility efforts by equating genuine medical needs to religious beliefs, which can be discarded at a moment’s notice and are not meaningfully genuinely held by any but the most devoted few (most of whom would resemble something more akin to a hermit or ascetic monk, not an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist or anti-abortion campaigner). This is no accident: the normalization of Covid necessitates the marginalization of those with immune system deficiencies and the idea that their ability to participate in public life can be sacrificed at the altar of consumerism. Reducing their valid health concerns to the level of a superstition helps to accomplish this.

This the kind of fascist traditionalism that underpins far right ideology, an “anything goes” a la carte legalism that makes overtures toward high-minded concepts like civil society only because it has to, and only perfunctorily. To put it bluntly: these decisions are about reasserting control over a demographic whose (relative) freedom to pursue an alternative lifestyle the fascists have long resented. They have discovered that decentralization is a short-term solution which will allow a gerrymandered majority in arbitrarily-drawn county and state borders to determine the fate of its inhabitants’ private lives (who are almost always unable to just leave the area), their bodily autonomy, and, where the EPA decision is concerned, the right to live in a temperate enough climate that economic activity is even possible. It is about religious condemnation and finger-wagging at its core: religionists are famous for looking the other way on sins they wish to commit themselves, and big business is no different; when others are exercising autonomy over their own body, suddenly one interpretation of the Bible becomes so overwhelmingly important to the that they feel compelled to codify its strictures into law, lest they be accused of rendering unto Caesar that which is apparently not meant to be rendered unto Caesar. All of this is an argument for more strictly barring religious expression from public life and the recognition that any argument resting on its precepts is unacceptable and should be ostracized (such as the argument that any fetus is meaningfully “alive”).

In the end, it is just as problematic to use religious justification to establish a universal basic income or free healthcare or reproductive rights as it is to cite god’s opinion as a reason to limit or destroy them: once that genie is out of the bottle, it is impossible to control, and the damage it does to the discourse is irreversible and interconnected to the mass death of rational thought which was the most successful fascist program in the last 50 years of American history, and closely related to the privatization and defunding of public education. This destruction was motivated by “choice”—mainly the right-wing choice to remain ignorant and teach children unscientific lies about global climate change and now, the opposition to learning that their white ancestors were anything but infallible angels (critical race theory). To allow religious intrusion into politics is to give an unearned sheen of holiness and uprightness to, for example, movements restricting reproductive freedom. There is no rational difference between the statements “I am a socialist because I believe god exhorts us to take care of the downtrodden and support an egalitarian society” and “I am against abortion rights because I believe god exhorts us to care for all lives, including a developing fetus.” Neither of these can be argued with in either direction—they are useless conceptually and rhetorically. Importantly, one is more exploitable by far right monied interests.

Compromise of this kind has thus far gotten leftists very little in American politics. The Democratic party, which could not be described as anything other than center-right but is the only putative opposition to the far-right fascist program set forth by the Republicans, place compromise above all else. It could be argued that their willingness to meet Republicans halfway or more is not reflective of any actual genuine socialist or even leftist leanings in the party, which could be described as a slightly more humanist version of the same disaster capitalism and accelerationist environmental destruction practiced by their opposition, but the example is nonetheless applicable for several reasons: one, it is the only mainstream, visible force in American politics with anything resembling a leftist wing and therefore the only example of compromise in action; two, it illustrates the idea that placing the onus of compromise on the underdog will inevitably result in their moving to the right with nothing to show for it. The Republicans control the narrative and will call Democrats “socialists” no matter how they compromise. Religionists will do the same to socialists despite their already overwhelmingly conciliatory attitude toward the religious (Levin does not establish that there is anything resembling anti-theistic hostility within leftist movements because there is none).

If we cite the recent history of the Democratic party as an example of the kind of compromise argued for in the Jacobin article, the only conclusion we can draw is that we should be unyielding in our secular principles and require a scientific, rational argument for socialism that is based on the generally shared principle that if we are to live in a society, socialism is the best way to maximize everyone’s happiness and is indeed the only way to save the human project given the looming (and already underway) climate breakdown, the only force capable of reigning in capitalism as it seeks to usher in anthropogenic warming and ecosystem exploitation beyond anything our civilization could conceivably handle intact. Thankfully, this is an easy argument to make, and it should be made more frequently to combat the real enemy: the well-financed far-right propaganda machine, which Republicans have successfully employed to popularly establish numerous obvious falsehoods, one of which is that the intrusion of religion into politics is a harmless, even beneficial and potentially neutral tool for social movements to use as they please. That this propaganda has been internalized by many socialists is something I’ve previously written about:

Latching onto the problematic opinions of people like Dawkins and Harris and ascribing them to the ideology itself is a form of mischaracterization which would be met with immediate outcry by religious leftists if they were asked to answer for the actions of Jerry Falwell, Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, or Jim Bakker. The outcry surrounding their bigoted and Islamophobic opinions among those in the atheist community is in fact evidence that a movement based on rational skepticism is more able to repudiate inconsistency in its ranks. Compare the responses in either case: the religionist has no leg to stand on when debating Falwell, whose interpretation of scripture is no less valid just because it’s not as fashionable as it once was, whereas a real rational skeptic should be able to easily and soundly reject Islamophobia, transphobia, anti-woke ideology, and any other problematic position its own charlatans espouse (and most do), because those charlatans put forth an ostensibly scientific, reciprocal (i.e. based on common ground scientific argumentation) rationale for their position. It may be illogical and idiotic, but insofar as it isn’t based on mystical thinking, it can only be so problematic, because an atheist’s transphobia can be effectively argued against.

This criticism of the new atheists summarizes all of the religious right’s arguments, which amount to a retreat to moral and philosophical solipsism—they are unable to make their case in a rational way and so have to resort to alternative, mystical modes of thinking. Having ceded their position as the undeniable bearers of ultimate truth, the religious right resorts to underhanded political tactics (see for example Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), direct appeals to populism (“This is one nation under God”), and offensive smears against opponents (accusing LGBTQ teachers of “grooming” children, for example). That some contemporary US leftists have internalized this framing is a disservice to the many victims of religious bigotry, and to criticize the atheist movement as being classist or problematic in some other way simply because religious worship is more common among the poor or because some of its leaders attempted to commodify it in exactly the same way as occurs in other groups is indicative of a widespread prejudice against atheists and the singling out of our imperfections over those of any other group. The rejection of god remains an important first step on the road to enlightenment, and it should be encouraged alongside the rejection and replacement of atheism’s troubling leaders in the service of building a better, explicitly socialist New Atheism movement which openly welcomes the marginalized and downtrodden and fights for their inclusion as we do for our own.

See also my dissection of the irrational belief in god itself, “True Religious Belief is Impossible,” and “Misanthropic Communism,” in which I argue that the deification of the romanticized notion of the proletariat in certain leftist circles causes confusion and the knee-jerk acceptance of that demographic’s worst qualities, their tendency toward shortsighted spirituality chief among them:

The poor are indeed perfectly capable of exhibiting worse behaviors than the rich, and the undeserved lionization of the working class and all its prejudices and misconceptions is a common misstep among modern leftists. The religiosity of the poor is commonly cited as a criticism of atheism, and their prejudices and ignorance are excused (not explained) by their lack of equal access to education and information. The poor are disadvantaged, and this leads to negative outcomes which limit their ability to develop intellectually, but in holding up the working class as unassailable paragons of virtue, as one would need to do in order to maintain an unflinchingly positive view of the proletariat, the incidental failings are redefined as acceptable if not desirable outcomes. This goes beyond rational support for the impoverished, which is the ultimate goal of any good communist—in the minds of some less astute reformers, the poor’s weaknesses are taken to define them and therefore the movement.

Many poor do actually consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and vote and act as such. Many are purely self-interested and know that their modest comforts are the product of a colonial international monetary arrangement that parasitizes the workers of the third world to a much greater extent than those in the first world. Rather than seek solidarity with these workers, they externalize their suffering, preferring to wear the cheap clothing they manufacture or eat the food they die to bring to our tables, rationalizing the damning process as necessary for survival in a food desert or the result of limited options. Ask the poor to stop eating meat or wearing sweatshop clothing and these collaborators will reply that they cannot afford to, all while doing nothing to better their situation by organizing or even just voting for an actual leftist who would improve their conditions, often over prejudice and culture war issues manufactured by the capitalists to distract them from pressing issues. They are comfortable in their desperation, content to foist the worst of the capitalist system’s damages on those even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are.

The article ends with a quote which, read uncharitably, is almost offensive:

“Capitalism is itself a kind of spiritual illness,” says Aaron Anderson, “a way of breaking humanity’s spiritual connection and its connection with God.”

The amount of damage capitalism has done to our bodies and brains is incalculable. To worry for even a moment about its damaging effects on something illusory and nonexistent is to immediately minimize both the deleteriousness of capitalism and the measurable, falsifiable, scientific impact it has on the lives of society’s most vulnerable. We have food insecurity, homelessness, millions of pollution deaths, climate catastrophes accelerating in both frequency and strength…at the end of the list of every complaint one could make about the free market, its effect on the human soul would barely register. This kind of article is common, and it sadly buys into far-right propaganda that the natural state of any Christian is one of right-wing politicization in its assumption that this is something the left needs to actively fight against. It is neither the natural state of Christianity nor a platform the left needs to bend over backwards to accept. In reality, this is what the mixing of religion and politics results in:

The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.

A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement that brought us the radical majority on the Supreme Court is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

They intend to use that arsenal — together with additional weaponry collected in cases like Carson v. Makin, which requires state funding of religious schools if private, secular schools are also being funded; and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which licenses religious proselytizing by public school officials — to prosecute a war on individual rights, not merely in so-called red state legislatures but throughout the nation.