An unfortunate perennial genre in American Christian literature which has seen a bit of a resurgence in light of recent events, is that which states that American Christians should have nothing to do with anything regarded as ‘left’ in politics. Of course, on its face this is an absurd anachronism – the ‘left’ being a constellation of political values from a later time starting around the seventeenth century, most of which accord with Christianity and some of which do not – and this blog hopefully stands witness against it going all the way back to its beginnings, but it seems necessary to refute some of the core claims of this genre.
This doctrine proclaimed by these passionate haters of all things related to the political left make four core claims: that Christianity is first and foremost concerned with judging or saving individual souls and not with judging or saving systems or collectivities; that Christianity is supposed to promote a uniform social unity instead of division; that Christianity is pacific in nature and should have nothing to do with the passions of anger that are stirred up by left-wing political doctrines; and that Christianity is not concerned with material goods but instead spiritual ones.
There are some obvious theological and indeed simply logical contradictions that this voluntarist-individualist reactive hæresy falls prey to that can be noticed right off the bat. In short, however, I take strong issue with the first three of these assertions and hold that they are not Christian – and I happen agree with the last one, though I hold together with Nikolai Berdyaev that it is ultimately a bigger problem for Christians on the political right than for Christians on the left. In the end, despite the stated intentions of defending Christianity against Marxism, this genre of writing only creates greater confusion for Christians, and in the process only creates more space for actual Marxism to thrive.
Christ does judge nations
The most absurd claim of the American Christian right, on its face, is that God does not judge systems or collectivities, but is instead concerned only with the fate of individuals. Such a position can only even come about as a result of the legalistic understandings of sæcular modernity, with its narrow juridical focus on the exact guilt or innocence of an individual for a particular instance of criminality. But God has judged entire cities and entire nations for their sins. I’m not going to give a whole bunch of proof-texts for this because that work has already been done; suffice it to say that all one has to do is crack open the Old Testament at any given point to ascertain that this is the case. As Fr Stephen Freeman pointed out recently, God judging the nations is one of the key themes of the Old Testament, and in much of the Mosaic narrative and indeed most of the Hebrew Prophets, Israel as a whole is judged in the light of the Law. God judges Sodom and Gomorrah as a whole, God judges Ægypt as a whole. God is ready to judge Nineveh as a whole before Jonah urges the people of that city to repent. The judgement of God often comes through the actions of individual human beings: the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of the Temple are interpreted in the Hebrew Scriptures as examples of God’s judgement against the Hebrews, even though these were actions undertaken by kings, the enemies of Israel.
This is not only a præoccupation of the Hebrew Scriptures, by the way. It extends into the Greek Scriptures, which are a recapitulation of the Law and not a reversal of it. In the Synoptic Gospels, particularly the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke, Jesus tells his disciples that whole cities will be judged according to how they treat the Gospel: ‘And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for that city.’ He also issues a condemnation against Capernaum in Saint Matthew 11: ‘And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to Hell: for if the mighty works which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for thee!’ Even in the Apocalypse of Saint John – once so popular amongst American conservatives – entire churches, entire cities and entire nations are subject to the judgement of God as communities and not as individuals.
To give one modest example of how the Fathers thought about the question of whether salvation is individual or communal, the Hymns of Saint Ephraim the Syrian carry this idea into the history of salvation, with the Persians, Medes and Babylonians atoning for the sins of their nations and the sins of their peoples in the persons of the Magi, bringing gifts to the Theotokos and the Heir of David. This beautiful typological imagery in the Hymns of Saint Ephraim is only possible to appreciate within a Patristic worldview in which we are responsible for each other, and in which it is possible for many to be saved through the sincere repentance of fifty righteous people, of twenty, of ten, or even of one righteous person within a nation. This is the worldview of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as well, who tells Alyosha that ‘all men are guilty for everyone’, and therefore that it is necessary to ‘forgive everyone for everything’; and this is the point of the sinful old woman in the parable in the same book, who was ‘given the onion’ at the Judgement – and stood ready to empty Hell with it, until she grew greedy and desired that salvation only for herself.
It is an explicit denial of the entire worldview of the Prophets, of the Apostles, of the Church Fathers and indeed of Christ Himself, to say that salvation is a purely individual matter, and that we are only responsible in a narrow and juridical sense for what we ourselves do. Do we respond to God at the Judgement and reply with Cain, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ No: all are guilty for everyone; and everyone must be forgiven for everything. This is what the Christianity of Dostoevsky proclaims. But American individualists attack this Christianity and call it Marxism.
‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword’
But the foregoing is not to say that salvation in Christ aims at a monistic and nirvanic dissolution of all personality within the grand unity of the cosmos, the way the dharmic religions do. Christ does not erase our histories, our particularities or our backgrounds when He saves us and when we join ourselves to Him. One sees this in the theology of the Incarnation itself: in becoming man, the God Who is the source of all things and is therefore beyond any description or appellation – even beyond being and non-being – became a poor, working-class Palestinian Jewish baby, with a biological mother, a hometown, an ethnic, a religious and a political identity. It is not possible to adequately know or to love a ‘what’, or even to love something that is beyond ‘what’. It is, however, possible to love a ‘who’, and Christ is very much a ‘who’.
And yet, the hæretical assertion of voluntarist individualism by American Christendom ironically results in precisely such an erasure of personality. One sees this, ironically enough, in the same Federalist article which attacks ‘neo-Marxist’ theology – only to end up advocating for a bland, nondescript, deracinated, outwardly-enforced cultural ‘unity’ (as opposed to ‘divisiveness’) that is every bit as grey and dull and conformist and oppressive as the most caricatured of communist dictatorships! There is no room for personality in an individualist society. As Wendell Berry put it: ‘Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.’
Christ did not come to bring such a conformist unity. Christ did not even come to preserve any sort of pre-existing social unity. Christ did not come to say to us, in that execrable contemporary phrasing: ‘You do you.’ Christ, the Incarnate God, stands against both reductive voluntarist individualism, and blind, stultifying conformity. Christ is divisive. The call to follow Christ is divisive. The Cross takes up one from her bed and leaves another sleeping. Again, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, our Lord says this: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ The Gospel explicitly cuts across the power relations and group markers that the world foists upon us: it even cuts across family relations. The Gospel is such that men are delivered up before governors and kings and councils. The Gospel is such that men who proclaim it are ‘scourged in the synagogues’.
The Gospel is such that those who proclaim it are hated even in their own countries, and even among their own families. If your Christianity is such that you are not hated by the governors and the kings and the councils and scourged in the synagogues – if your Christianity is such that you are ready to side with an unthinking ‘majority’ in the name of a voluntarist individualism masquerading as the Gospel – then whatever you are doing, you are not taking up the Cross.
‘Be ye angry, and sin not’
Christ got angry. He was not a Tolstoyan pacifist; He was not a Vulcan from Star Trek. Christ struck a fig tree with a curse when it did not provide fruit. Understand what this means in the typological worldview in which the Gospel was first read: the fig tree is symbolic of Israel, and the fruit of the fig tree is symbolic of the works of mercy and compassion. (Here again, Christ is judging a nation, that ‘neo-Marxist’!) When Christ got to Jerusalem, He went into the Temple, denounced the money-changers as a den of robbers, overturned their tables and drove them out with a whip of cords. Why did He do this? Because he saw them taking advantage of the poor, using the structural advantages afforded by the Temple as an instrument of social ‘cleansing’ and expiation of debts to coerce the poor into buying animals for sacrifice.
Saint Paul tells us in his letter to the Church in Ephesus: ‘Be ye angry, and sin not’. This is in a passage telling the people of that Church how they are to forgive each other. Saint Paul is an excellent psychologist: he does not tell the people that their anger is unjust, or that they should paper it over or hide it or coat it over with layers of sentimentality and false piety. He tells them that if they are angry, they should be angry, but that they should not let the sun set on their wrath. That is to say: they should not let that anger fester and darken silently and accumulate over days and weeks and years, but instead seek to deal with it openly and in a constructive way when it appears. What we are seeing now in the society is what happens when Saint Paul’s advice is ignored. We have allowed so much anger to build up between different sections of the society, and so many suns to set on that anger, that it spills over into violence and social conflict. So when the Federalist uses the letter to the Philippians to tells black activists to ‘be content’ with their lot and quiescent in the face of deadly violence and injustice, what they are saying is precisely the opposite of what Saint Paul meant.
Bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question
Finally, there’s the old canard about any concern for equity in the distribution of a polity’s goods and services being an expression of ‘materialism’. By that very same token, the early Christians in the Book of Acts were materialists – because they all gave of their own possessions and then distributed them to the needy, and those of them who held back their goods from the Apostles and lied about it, like Ananias and Sapphira, were cursed and expelled. The arbitrary and utterly-modernist dividing line between ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ giving in light of political realities about the way goods are distributed is likewise a recurrent frustration of mine in dealing with Americanists. The saccharine Americanist piety wrongly presumes that – not even the intentions, but the voluntary status of the giver – is the sole determining factor in whether or not a transfer of wealth is ‘materialistic’ or not. This is literally the piety of the Pharisee who stands in the marketplace loudly proclaiming his gifts to the poor! I’ve talked about this classically-idiotic libertarian canard so much and so often over the years – as here, here and here – that it feels a bit like I’m a broken record player.
Ultimately, my retort has to be Berdyaev’s, from The Fate of Man in the Modern World: ‘The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbour is a spiritual question.’ And my retort has to be the retort of the Russian Orthodox Church, which more than any other institution on the face of the planet has reason to distrust Stalinism: ‘The Church always comes out in defence of the voiceless and powerless. Therefore, she calls upon society to ensure the equitable distribution of the fruits of labour, in which the rich support the poor, the healthy the sick, the able-bodied the elderly.’ Jesus spoke against the maldistribution of wealth in the Temple when he called attention to the widow’s two copper coins; and the Church has spoken against the maldistribution of wealth since at least Saints Basil and John and Gregory.
The concern over the just distribution of wealth is not, a priori, a ‘materialist’ concern in the pejorative sense meant. What’s more, insofar as Marxism is a doctrine that applies materialist logic to its subject matter – which is to say, the œconomy – it is analysing precisely the materialist priorities of the society it inhabits. The analytical materialism of Marxism is precisely a reflection of the self-interested materialism of the bourgeoisie. Even ex-Marxists and critics of Marxism like Berdyaev and Bulgakov both understood this. It’s particularly telling that the Federalist does not condemn materialist striving for selfish reasons – ‘try[ing] to better our conditions on this side of heaven’, that is. It’s as if they are saying that materialism is only bad when it’s not self-interested.
If you’re going to try and attack Marxism, in short – make sure that you understand what Marxism is. The Federalist, scared stiff by Black Lives Matter, sets out to attack Marxism and defend Christianity. But in the process it attacks what is truly and authentically Christian going back to the first centuries of Our Lord, and contributes to an ideological atmosphere ideal for creating Marxists!
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