The Case Against a ‘Religious Left’
· The Atlantic
The victories last week of the Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico and the United Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton in the Texas and Kansas Senate races prompted renewed attention to America’s elusive religious left. For years, Republicans have been the presumptive party for those with serious Christian convictions. These wins raise the possibility that talking openly about faith might be a way for Democrats to reach new voters, and a viable path to power going forward.
Visit playerbros.org for more information.
I am a Christian and often wish that American politics better reflected the revolutionary elements of the faith, such as mercy, forgiveness, and nonviolence. But hailing the rise of a religious left is premature. More than that, Christians with left-leaning political tendencies would be diminished by becoming little more than a standard Democratic voting bloc.
Talarico and Hamilton are not the first Democratic faith leaders to win seats in Congress. In the recent past, Raphael Warnock was elected U.S. senator in Georgia, and Emanuel Cleaver and Cori Bush were elected to the U.S. House in Missouri; all three are pastors from the Black Christian tradition, which has a long-standing relationship with politics on the left. If Talarico and Hamilton (along with the ministers Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James in Iowa, who both won House seats) are remarkable figures on the religious left, it is in part because they are white. They also all flipped red jurisdictions. The question raised by their success is whether an overtly religious Democratic approach might peel off voters who take religion seriously but have been wary of voting for Democrats in the past.
The fact that Democrats won so handily across the board in last week’s elections means that it’s still unclear to what extent Hamilton and Talarico prevailed because of their religious messaging versus a broader backlash to the GOP. What we know so far suggests that the effect was limited: According to a poll published by the Associated Press, the two candidates each earned about 20 percent of the white evangelical vote in their respective states; the rest overwhelmingly supported Republicans, representing no significant departure from baseline evangelical voting patterns.
[Peter Wehner: A good night for the Christian faith]
The problem for anyone hoping for a new religious left is that there isn’t a natural constituency for it. Ryan Burge, a political scientist and statistician who specializes in religion, points out that the number of mainline Protestants, the natural reservoir of left Christian sentiment, is rapidly dwindling, representing just 11 percent of Americans today. Burge also told me that long-term data have shown that as people become more politically liberal, they tend to leave religion altogether, meaning that the Democratic voting base could continue to become less religious with time. Young people, meanwhile, are less religious than older generations; only 36 percent of people born from 2004 to 2008 and 27 percent born from 2000 to 2003 describe religion as very important in their lives.
For Christians with leftist politics, these dynamics can be frustrating because they result in political disempowerment. But that might also, in certain respects, be a gift. One need only look to the religious right for a cautionary tale about what happens when believers collaborate too closely with a political party. Evangelicalism, the Christian tradition that has become key to Republican victories, has grown so thoroughly entwined with the GOP that it can sometimes be difficult to determine who is setting the agenda for whom. That kind of secularization of religion and sacralizing of politics would be a curse for the religious left.
The risks of a Christian left attempting to counterbalance the Christian right are numerous. Democratic Christian politicians might find themselves softening their Christian beliefs to comply with the party’s expectations. Once politicians noticed that winning the Christian left could become a viable electoral strategy, then those believers would be converted into a mere Democratic voting constituency to be wooed with targeted messaging and small rewards. The party might start pandering to Christians without any respect for the things that make them distinct—such as radically prioritizing the welfare of poor people, migrants, and those who are otherwise oppressed—viewing them as a means to an end. Christian voters, in turn, might be tempted to give up unique aspects of their religious character in service to the party.
A number of other unseemly outcomes would then also be on the table. Candidates might merely pretend to be religious, as Donald Trump has sometimes claimed to be (for example, holding up a Bible in front of a church during the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C.). Cynical party elites might patronize believers with frivolous offerings—for example, White House prayer events much like Trump’s recent meeting with a number of Catholic clergy, some of whom, realizing they had been used as political props, quickly backed away.
[Peter Wehner: The issue Christian voters are neglecting]
A newfound alliance between Democrats and Christians might do little for Christians while also failing to do much for the Democrats. Michael Wear, the president of the Center for Christianity and Public Life and a former Obama-administration faith-outreach official, told me that Democrats should refrain from using Talarico and Hamilton as templates for recruiting future candidates, because that could easily backfire. “The worst thing that you could do is try to overly turn this into a strategy,” he said. “The thing about these candidates is the earnestness of them—the fact that they weren’t cooked up” by party officials.
Christian politicians on the left can and should be forthright about their convictions, just without being captured by Democratic Party priorities. Otherwise, they run the risk of trading the flimsy Christian politics of the right for flimsy Christian politics on the left. Shortly after the election, the Anglican author Tish Harrison Warren wrote that although she was glad that Talarico won, she had been put off by his tendency to fit his Christianity too neatly into his Democratic politics, as Republicans have to a greater degree. (Talarico declined, for instance, to support universal health care despite the obvious Christian reasons for extending healing to everyone, and instead advocated for what he termed “Medicare for Y’all,” a public option program more in keeping with policies pushed by mainstream Democrats.) Jesus, Warren said, should not be an American politician in a business suit, conveniently cooperating with every dictate of the Republican Party. “It is no great victory if the religious left takes the same old political Jesus in the suit and simply turns his tie blue,” she wrote. “Different party. Same idolatry.”
Christians should be open, in my view, to certain leftist political positions; the two tendencies share much more than is commonly assumed. Likewise, leftists should be open to counting Christians among their ranks, even when their priorities are different from those of nonreligious voters and politicians. But it also seems best for the faithful to entertain politics skeptically, and to beware of the warping gravitational pull that politics exerts upon religion when the two draw close. The believer’s kingdom is, in the end, not of this world.