One of the less interesting but increasingly common attacks one hears in Christian institutions is that some person or group is trying to “smuggle” liberalism or leftism into the church. Those targeted this way might claim to be bona fide evangelicals who believe the Bible. But critics suspect they’re merely mouthing the right words so they can sneak their Trojan horse of radical Marxism inside the gates of your church.
No one can make this accusation against Phil Christman’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. It says right in the title that he’s not advocating a third way or just trying to make conservative Christians better listeners. Christman, an English professor who has worked extensively in the prison system, genuinely wants Christians to be political leftists.
I am, in some ways, part of the target audience for this book. At the very least, I am deeply sympathetic to what Christman wants: I have a half-finished document from 2019 sitting in my drafts folder entitled “Why Christian Conservatives Should Be Leftists and Leftists Should Be Conservative Christians.” Which makes it all the more disappointing to find that Christman hasn’t given the average right-leaning Christian any especially compelling arguments for swinging left.
Why Christians Should Be Leftists begins with Christman’s own story of coming to reject many of the political assumptions of his evangelical youth. He describes a transformative encounter with the Sermon on the Mount that forced him to acknowledge the value of each person created in God’s image. This realization, in turn, forced him to reconsider any economic or political arrangement that would exploit a person’s labor or judge that person by his or her earning potential.
Christman’s account of this moral awakening, along with later chapters expounding on the political implications of Jesus’ teachings, are the most compelling parts of the book. His convictions in this vein are worth celebrating and emulating—all people, even our most-hated political enemies, deserve a legal and social order that honors their inherent worth as human beings. However, it feels as if these later portions should have come earlier, helping to establish common ground with readers by describing the biblical basis for the author’s political principles. Instead, he jumps right into the more contentious bits.
Part of the problem with those contentious bits is that Christman doesn’t explicitly define the entire program he wants readers to subscribe to—or even prioritize. The closest he gets to defining the “leftism” he advocates comes in the second chapter, when he enumerates a set of specific practices and principles. As he argues, Christianity entails
massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes), the right of marginalized communities and exploited nations to self-defense, a much-lessened emphasis on punishment-for-its-own-sake and on revenge and a much greater emphasis on harm reduction in our systems of punishment, an abhorrence of war, and an avoidance of the hoarding of wealth and power.
Much of the book focuses on his first and last point, about the concentration of wealth and power in society and the ways it ought to be redistributed. There are some compelling arguments here—namely, that the wealthy and powerful will always be tempted to exploit the weak and poor to acquire more wealth and power. Christman rightly observes that there are no abstract and scientific laws of economics that somehow supersede our moral obligations to one another. The temptation to treat people like machines has existed for a very long time, and every political system requires strong restraints against exploiting people like property.
Beyond this, though, Why Christians Should Be Leftists never distinguishes between primary, secondary, and tertiary issues. The author knows quite well that conservative Christians will be squeamish about certain cultural issues, but the book heavily implies that a good leftist will adopt the standard liberal or left-wing perspective on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender identity.
Abortion, for example, gets only one long footnote, despite the role of pro-life convictions in keeping Christians aligned with the Republican Party. To many Christians, abortion is the ultimate legally sanctioned instance of treating people like property. Christman claims that “bans don’t work” (although evidence exists that they can, including recent research from scholars at Johns Hopkins University, who concluded that a Texas ban increased the number of births in the state). Even setting that debate aside, pro-life Christians generally retain a strong moral notion that governments looking out for people created in God’s image should extend that same solicitude to unborn children.
Christman argues that the best way to reduce abortions is “a very strong social safety net for new parents.” This is neither a new argument nor one that yields a settled consensus. It fits naturally, though, alongside a broader argument that building a more generous welfare state promotes the formation of strong families.
Numerous conservatives, however marginal they might be within current power structures, have advanced such arguments. Yet Christman doesn’t acknowledge any of this. Where do the Christian democratic parties of Europe, which have linked cultural conservatism and aggressive welfare policies for decades, fit into the picture? The book doesn’t say.
Similarly, there are many topics of public debate where the leftist concern for poor people being exploited points toward natural alliances with conservatives. The lure of legal euthanasia in Canada pressures the poorest citizens to end their lives. Unrestricted gambling is immiserating vulnerable families. Universally accessible porn is inculcating vicious misogyny against women and girls.
On such matters, any leftist should be able to tell a conservative neighbor, “Hey! We’re on the same side, and we want the government to intervene.” Christman misses an opportunity by ignoring these possibilities. (He also includes a handful of whoppers, like his claim that “the infant mortality rate for Black children in the United States is at positively premodern levels.” In fact, the infant mortality rate for Black Americans is about 10.8 per 1,000 live births, twice the rate for white children but still consistent with trends across America back in the mid-1980s.)
Ultimately, though, the biggest flaw with Why Christians Should Be Leftists is that it will do little to change minds among most right-leaning Christians.
I won’t fault the book for not being a dense work of political theology, although omitting John Calvin’s statement from his commentary on Psalm 82—that political rulers “are appointed to be the guardians of the poor”—feels like another missed opportunity. But other gaps are less defensible. One critical issue—the distinction between private charity and government aid that historic Christian leftists like Dorothy Day would have vigorously emphasized—receives just one footnote. Another—immigration—barely registers on the book’s discussion of global justice. The uncomfortable political reality is that unlimited immigration will undermine even the most robust welfare system. Many countries with generous social safety nets have found themselves reckoning with this tension in recent years.
Over the past few decades, extreme poverty and child mortality have decreased dramatically across the world even while wealth and power have remained concentrated in the hands of a few. This suggests that free markets can accomplish a great deal of good, even without countervailing government policies designed to reduce income inequality. But Christman betrays little awareness of these patterns. In general, he simply makes little effort to argue from biblical principles to concrete policies or even the general direction of leftism.
As a result, I struggle to think of any non-leftist Christian who would benefit from reading this book. Christman excels when thinking theologically about what it means for human beings to be created and loved by God. But then he simply assumes that readers, having contemplated these truths, will embrace leftist politics as a matter of course.
There are many Christians, like me, who wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes to help fund a more vigorous welfare state, even as we maintain strong convictions about abortion, marriage, and euthanasia. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for a book that might convince our left-skeptical friends to join us.
Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.
