by I was recently invited to join the ReligiousLeftLaw blog, and with their kind permission, I’m going to be cross-posting some of my thoughts both here and there. Here’s the substance of my first effort:
Let’s define the religious left, very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward some sort of religious universalism, comfort with freedom of inquiry and with self-consciously non-literal or non-absolute readings of sacred texts, aversion to very rigid doctrinal formulations, and a positive engagement with both secular culture and other religious traditions. Let’s define the political left, again very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward a commitment to individual and collective rights (or at least many types of individual and collective rights) along with a strong dose of social and economic egalitarianism and real skepticism about the power of the unfettered market to meet basic human needs. What is the relation between the two? And what, for that matter, is the relation between religious conservatism and political conservatism?
It is certainly absurd to imagine that there is any automatic, foundational, connection between location on the religious spectrum and location on the political spectrum. There are also a healthy number of counterexamples to any easy assumption we might want to make about such a connection. (See here.) I’m not just thinking of American evangelicals on the left (see Michael Perry’s recent post about recent voting trends among younger evangelicals, who might be accused of drifting at least a bit left on both dimensions, but of such truly bracing, outlandishly radical, thinkers as the “Radical Orthodox” “Christian socialist” group assembled around John Milbank. And while it’s a bit harder, as Steve suggested, to find folks on the Christian left and the political right, they do exist; one quick Google search found me the Facebook site of the “Conservative Forum for Unitarian Universalists.“ (See also this helpful sermon by an Oklahoma UU minister.) And while it’s dangerously anachronistic to project back words like “left” and “right,” it’s certainly becomes even easier, if we turn back to the early twentieth century and earlier, to find religious conservatives at the forefront of politically progressive thought and action, and religious liberals on the other side.
So, if there’s no automatic, logical, link, is there at least a tendency? Is there an imperfect, but still real, connection between religious universalism and economic egalitarianism, or between appreciation of the open texture of religious texts and the defense of individual liberty?
I don’t know, and the question is too complicated to even begin to deal with here. Yes, political and religious liberalism both have strong roots in the same formative moments in the Enlightenment and Reformation. But that proves too much, for those grand historical forces influence almost everybody today — right, left, up, or down. My guess is that many of the connections we often assume are just obvious between the political left and the religious left (and between the political right and the religious right) in our own time and culture are deeply contingent. Our present state of affairs have a lot to do, I think, with the role of the Social Gospel in mainline Christianity, and with the cultural alienation of evangelicals around the 1920′s, which knocked the wind out of the William Jennings Bryan populist synthesis of political progressivism with conservative Christianity. But I could easily be way off.
Anyway — and this is the real point of this post — I want these connections to be contingent and accidental and open to transformative rethinking. Now, personally, I’m sort of mildly center-left religiously and sort of mildly center-left politically, so this is not my own plea for understanding. But I do believe in a variation of the medieval principle of plenitude: I think it’s enormously healthy for our spiritual and political lives and for our common religious and political discourse when a maximum number of logically coherent intermediate ideological categories find real, robust, living instantiations, and we’re not just left with easy choices and simple dichotomies. So I want to cheer on the politically conservative Unitarians and the politically liberal evangelicals and all the rest. I want to learn from them, and be challenged by them. I hope they find their voice in our otherwise way-too-polarized culture.
For what it’s worth, some of my own scholarship has tried to break down easy assumptions about the connections between various staring pont and various possible conclusions. See, for example, here and here and here. If anyone’s interested, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Although I agree that there is no direct and inexorable link between a person’s place on the religious spectrum and the political spectrum, I do think there is a definite connection that is not likely to go away. I can’t offer any conclusive reasons for the connection, but I’ll posit a few suggestions.
First, there may be a connection between the religious left’s approach to religious texts and doctrine and its approach to constitutional and social norms. Religious conservatives seem very likely to approach the United States Constitution with the same literal and absolute reading that characterizes their approach toward the Bible or other holy books. In a country with an unwritten constitution, a religious conservative might still approach the constitution with an eye toward the teachings of the past, just as he approaches religious matters with an eye toward tradition. As it relates to social issues such as marriage, family, and the protection of life, political conservatives tend to appeal either to tradition or to the “rigid doctrinal formulations” of religious teachings. Political or religious liberals will likely reject appeals to religious formalism and will instead appeal to more progressive concepts of social equality.
The connection between the religious and political realms seems more complex in the economic realm. As a counterpart to your definition of the political left, I would define the political right as having a real skepticism about the power of unfettered government to meet basic human needs and to protect individual liberty. (I would say that both left and right are committed to individual rights, with the difference being in which rights are emphasized.) These tendencies of conservatives to distrust government and liberals to distrust the free market are difficult to explain in terms of religious viewpoints. One possibility, however, is that religious conservatives take a pessimistic view of human nature, and they therefore greatly distrust government actors. On the other hand they think that capitalism, although it can be abused, is less susceptible to abuse than is governmental power. Religious liberals, on the other hand, have a more optimistic view of human nature and place more confidence in the ability of government controls to appropriately direct the economic realm and achieve greater social equality.
Perhaps the best answer is a historical one, though one that is nevertheless related the theology of human nature. The rise of modern, 20th Century liberalism was closely tied to the religious and philosophical assumption that mankind is perfectible and can better itself through collective action and government intervention. Although the optimism of early modern liberalism was shaken by two world wars, its basic commitment to achieving equality through governmental and collective action has not changed. Conservatives, on the other hand, have insisted that any attempt to achieve a state of social and economic equality through government intervention is doomed to fail and is incompatible with individual liberty. I think both political and religious conservatives share a common belief that (1) humans are bad, (2) bad humans with too much power are dangerous, and (3) government should be restricted to restraining bad men and should not try to right all social and economic ills.
Maybe I’ve missed the mark, but at least I have taken a shot at your interesting question.