What The Left Gets Right (And What It Gets Wrong)

I consider myself to be a Biblical Christian. I believe that the Bible actually is the Word of God, and I believe what the Bible teaches about the holiness of God, the fallenness of man and the remedy for our fallenness in the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe in the Trinity of God (for anyone who thinks the Bible teaches otherwise, let me refer you to Matthew 28:19; John 1:1 and John 10:30, among many other verses). I can recite the Apostles' Creed and mean it, without having my fingers crossed behind my back.

Yet there are many elements of modern American evangelicalism that I can no longer accept. My movement away from its toxic ecclesiastical elements began in 2003. My movement away from its toxic political and economic elements began a bit later, around 2005, as gas prices first soared above $3 a gallon and I started to see just how hard it was for people in America to break free from our predatory economic system. As my movement progressed, I found myself reading and listening to many writers and thinkers on the political Left, people whom I had previously rejected during my flag-waving, Frank Peretti novel-reading, Christian talk-show radio listening, vote-Republican, let's-hang-out-at-the-Christian-bookstore days.

What I found in listening to voices from the Left is that while we usually disagreed on cosmogony (that is, how the universe and the people on earth came to be) as well as matters of personal (especially sexual) morality, there were many matters in which we were in strong agreement. I agreed with the Left's fear that godless, predatory capitalism was destroying the poor of the earth, and that it was destroying the earth itself. I agreed with the Left that the Iraq war was all about oil, and was illegitimate. I agreed with the Left that the world could no longer sustain a society such as ours, that depended on ever-increasing consumption and materialism, and that we would have to change our ways very quickly.

I also began to see the truth of the Left's accusations against the leaders of the Right, namely, that the Right seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of shills for the rich who are the owners of the major pieces of our economic and political systems. Thus I began to listen with new ears when I heard things that I had previously accepted unthinkingly, such as when prominent members of the Religious Right spoke against government-sponsored safety nets for the poor, or opposed the providing of public resources like libraries and mass transit, or railed against attempts to protect the environment. Usually these leaders would denounce such things by calling them “examples of Marxist socialism!!!!” or “governmental intrusion into the (God-given!) free market system.” Now that I was listening with new ears, I noticed that the statements of these leaders sounded like the tantrums of children.

I also noticed how the Left sought to use the discrediting of the Religious Right in order to discredit the Christian faith itself. I talked about this a bit in my post, A Dude In Bedlam. While I agree with many of the criticisms made by the Left, this is going too far. For one thing, it is intellectually dishonest. But the Left has made a further mistake, which, while not a direct attack on Christianity, is yet a result of rejecting one of the central teachings of Christianity. I'll explain it thus:

Many of the writers and thinkers on the Left have correctly diagnosed the present threats and dangers to our modern society and our world, and that these threats and dangers are the result of our greed and exponentially increasing consumption. They have accurately seen the role played by the leaders of our present system in perpetuating that system even though it is destined to break down. They have seen the stubbornness and determination of our leaders and powerful people at all levels of government and economic power in hanging on to their breaking system. They have also seen how many ordinary people are willingly enslaved to that system and its false promise of ever-increasing prosperity.

Yet many of those on the Left continue to believe that humanity is evolving into something better, and that our present difficulty is primarily an evolutionary struggle. They believe that mankind is capable of controlling its destiny in the sense of choosing a better evolutionary path, if only we can be educated to choose it. Thus, when they see the propensity of our society and its leaders to choose a self-destructive path, they propose solutions that don't take the full scope of the human condition into account.

Therefore, there are people who think that if we only teach humanity the proper values, we will all magically start acting differently, and the world will be a better place. There are others who look to evolutionary theory for some key, that if found, would help humanity make the jump to a higher state of being and a more sensible existence. Indeed, there has recently sprung up an entire discipline of “evolutionary psychology,” along with the even more impressive-sounding “evolutionary cognitive psychology,” which attempts to explain destructive and maladaptive human behavior entirely in biological terms. When some of these people give way to cravings they shouldn't indulge, they blame it on their “corpus callosum,” or the remnants of their “reptile brain.” When they see their fellow humans and the people in power making destructive choices, they believe the solution to be education and discussion. So they say things like, “Our leaders and people in power don't seem to understand the threats posed by Peak Oil, climate change, and environmental destruction. Their decisions would be different if they did understand. Therefore we must educate our society. Once they are educated, they will respond differently.”

As a Christian, I see things quite differently. When I see our leaders and the prominent figures of our society choosing the things they choose, I don't blame it on a failure of evolution or a lack of education. I blame it on indwelling evil. The Bible calls certain behaviors evil – and holds these behaviors as evidence that those who practice them are evil. Take the case of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – both the supposed products of thousands of years of “evolution” if you accept the cosmogony of the Left. I don't think that it was a defect of the corpus callosum or an asserting of the remnants of the “reptile brain” that made Bush and Cheney start an unjustified war against a country that had done nothing to us. It's not like they woke up one day and said to each other, “Man, I got a jones on! I've got to have me some Iraqi oil!” No, rather, they manufactured the most elaborate justifications for what they did. This is the nature of evil. Mere biological craving is one thing, but true spiritual evil acts on that craving even when it knows that in doing so, other lives will be violated. And true evil fabricates all sorts of justifications for its actions. The villains of the Right know good and well that what they are doing is wrong, yet they still do it.

Thus we see the failure of the Left – a failure to acknowledge the reality of evil in the world. It's not hard to see why the Left refuses this acknowledgement. For if the Left acknowledged evil as evil, it would also have to acknowledge the existence of an objective, righteous standard that measures good and evil and that exists independently of humans, by which each of us is measured, and which is the product of a righteous Standard-Maker. Acknowledging that the rich and powerful are in violation of the righteous standard of the Standard-Maker would force the members of the Left to look at their own lives and their own violations of that standard. That acknowledgement would force a further acknowledgement of the evil within each of us, our indwelling sin that is untamable by mortal man. Realizing this would lead to the realization of humanity's need for a Redeemer.

Such a realization is too frightening for the Left, whose members cling to standards of their own making suited to their particular quirks, who reject objective morality and an objective God, who blame humanity's present problems on a lack of evolutionary development, and who actually believe that it is possible for humans to create, by their own power, a utopia on earth.

As for me, I don't think we will ever be able to create a utopia by our own power. My views tend to line up with Reinhold Niebuhr, who once said, “It is because we had so completely miscalculated the character of human history that we are so frequently threatened by despair in this day of frustration and disappointed hopes. Our modern culture moved from a too simple optimism to a too deep despair... An adequate faith for a day of crisis will contain what modern men have completely dismissed, namely, a tragic sense of life and a recognition of the Cross as the final center of life's meaning...” (Source: “An Adequate Faith for the World Crisis,” Reinhold Niebuhr, 1947). Left entirely to ourselves, I fully expect that instead of creating utopia, we would create the sort of mess depicted in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. That book is a unique depiction of original sin, devastatingly funny in places, and in other places, simply devastating.