Why the Left Should Be Wary of the Religious Right
It will take a very precise type of messaging to reach them.
Religion and politics are intertwined, for better or for worse. In Christianity, that got its most significant boost when Constantine the Great became the first Roman emperor to convert to the faith. Scholars debate how authentic it was, whether it was a political ploy or a genuine conversion of the heart, but either way, the empire became linked with Christ. Almost everything horrific in the name of European colonialism that happened afterward was also in the name of Christ. People might argue they weren’t “real Christians” and they were abusing the religion to achieve the means to an end: wealth and power.
I would argue that they were absolutely “real Christians” and this is what Christianity looks like even today; you can’t help people heal from it without acknowledging that. Obviously I know from personal experience that “not all Christians” are like this, and Christianity is a wide-reaching religion with more denominations and personal variations than any other faith, as far as I know. I would not be considered a “real Christian” by about 75% of other people declaring themselves Christians. I call myself a Christian anyway.
In the United States, the grip of Christianity began with Puritans leaving England to practice a stricter and more repressive version of faith than their native Anglicanism. You can feel the puritanical streak throughout the country even today. Our God is desecrated on our capital, “In God we Trust” on grubby dollar bills, and the ten commandments hang in public government spaces. Our federal holidays are often Christian holidays. Every single U.S. president from Washington to Biden has been a self-professed Christian, and the majority of our politicians swear their oaths of office with their hands upon the Bible. “Separation of church and state” is a joke, and it goes both ways, from megachurch pastors prophesying in Trump’s favor to government officials trying to bring aspects of Christianity back to public schools.
I was raised by people actively involved in churches and in politics, and the two have been inseparable to me in my mind ever since. I don’t think I could give up politics to focus on religion, or vice versa. When I was a child, I believed there were no Christian Democrats. Christians, of course, were all Republicans. They didn’t advocate for the murder of babies or steal people’s money, after all, and that was what Democrats did. It was just that simple. How could you be a real Christian and not be a Republican? More wild than that was that SOME people didn’t even care about politics at all! To me, religion was inherently political. And of all the beliefs about God and faith I no longer have, I still believe that one. It’s just expressed differently.
Matt Taibbi, in an interview with Paul Jay for his publication The Analysis, said that the Democratic Party is losing large swaths of voters, and that for them, politics have become a religion. Both men come from a left-leaning, atheistic perspective. Both of them had good intent in this argument, and made points I agree with: Democrats often don’t care to pursue religiously minded people, and ignore them, much to their electoral detriment. I also agree that some swaths of the larger left also regularly harp on “identity politics” being annoying, forever focused on class — both liberals AND leftists fail to see, often in different ways, that no, you cannot separate people from their identities, and yes, our identities are of vital importance to us, and yes, you should acknowledge those identities and ask us to come together for a united goal, be it class or something else, rather than pretend like our various identities don’t matter to us. (And for leftists, especially: policies must reflect and acknowledge people’s identities.)
But then they said that for the left, politics have become a religion. This is the exact argument I used to hear Republican relatives make: that Democrats want the government to be God, because they don’t believe in God. They want the government to solve everything that God should be solving. They want the government to be as powerful as God. Blah blah blah bullshit. It’s true that more atheists and agnostics tend to be liberal rather than conservative! (Stay tuned for my post ranting about libertarian atheists…) But having lived through the horrors of people who are heavily invested in the Grand Ol’ Party, I would argue that it’s Republicans who value the idea of government as the hand of God, far more than Democrats do.
They also claim that the GOP is now the party of the working class, and the DNC is the party of the elite. This is a common leftist criticism of liberals, and in many cases, it’s true. I’d say that most elected Democrats, the people they hire around them as consultants, and most Democrats in the media are all of that stereotype. And to be fair, they are the most visible of the Democrats, and I have no desire to defend them. To me, they seem no better than most Republicans. But the majority of people with high incomes STILL vote Republican, not Democrat. The narrative that “the working class votes Republican” only works if you mean… the white, and largely male, working class. And by and large, white people of every class have more money than people of color, especially Black people, of every class. Voting demographics are never going to be as clean-cut as you want them to be for whatever narrative you’re trying to push, regardless.
Ultimately, it’s not that Taibbi and Jay’s criticisms of Democrats aren’t deserved (they are WELL deserved) it’s that in their false dichotomy, they place too much virtue on Republicans for supposedly courting the working class (which they do by exploiting bigotries) and being able to attune to the religious right (largely through the issue of abortion) better. And I’m begging my fellow leftists: please don’t do that.
The left’s failure to recognize white Christian Republicans’ desires for massive amounts of power through politics is dangerous. The theory of Dominionism is rooted in Manifest Destiny, which is rooted in colonialism: white Christians believe they have the right to conquer peoples and land in the name of God to save their souls. This is the most dangerous thing about fundamentalist evangelicals, and it’s not even close. To say that Republicans see religion and politics as separate is, frankly, insane. The majority of Republicans support political positions based on their faith, and that includes not just personal rights like abortion, marriage, drugs, and sex work, but also, yes, the economic ones.
I think non-religious political people operate under false assumptions of Christians, like that they are ambivalent toward the economic and nationalistic principles of conservatism. They’re not. The majority of white conservatives, yes, even the poor ones, support policies that include lessened taxes. In recent years, more people DO support things like Medicare for All, and Democrats have ignored that, giving fewer and fewer reasons for working class people to choose Democrats over Republicans. But if asked point blank on issues like higher taxes for rich people? They still tend to side with Republicans over Democrats, not that there’s much difference between the two in practice.
Yes, Jesus was a brown Jewish immigrant born into poverty, yes he was a radical, and yes his entire life was spent preaching for us to take care of the poor and suffering. But the majority of American Christians come from an ignoble, millennia-long tradition of ignoring that in favor of imperial goals. Bringing the kingdom by blood and by force, interpreting the Bible on a whim against our enemies of the moment. Christianity is a tool for the powerful. I don’t care if that’s “real” Christianity or not; because that is how it’s being used. I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe that this is the way Christianity should be practiced, and I don’t believe anything about it is Christ-like. But it simply IS how it’s being practiced, pointblank.
American Christians are Biblically illiterate and terribly uneducated on matters of antiquity, historic culture, and religion in general — their own, and certainly that of others. Just like with Trump voters (a Venn diagram that is nearly a circle) they do not care if you approach them with facts. They’ll ignore it. I haven’t even brought up the fact that many American evangelicals believe everything that is happening in the United States is part of God’s plan, and God’s plan is to bring about the end times and let everyone suffer and die while they go prance circles around angels in heaven. So no, you’re not going to “reason” with these people that LGBTQ people, poor people, immigrants, Muslims, etc. deserve humanity, much less personal rights or economic justice. And I assure you that they don’t give a shit about climate change either. Hey, maybe the earth being burned up by fire is part of God’s plan too! Because that’s exactly how they’re interpreting those Bible verses.
If you do not understand that, you will be shocked when you fail to reach the Christian conservative suburban voters — the majority of whom voted for Trump a second time in 2020, despite all the horrible things he said and did since 2016.
Some Christians, and I am only using anecdotal evidence here, -have- turned away from Trumpism and the Republican Party. But they had already pretty much turned away from evangelicalism already, mostly because we were sick of watching how they treated our gay friends. The fall of fundamentalism came FIRST. Because despite what secular people think, their identity is in their conservativism and their version of Christianity in equal proportions, and the two will not be separated by a vague prospect of free healthcare, no matter how much I wish it did. My Republican mom claims to support free healthcare; she’s never voted for a Democrat once in spite of this.
But hope is not lost. You can reach Christians without stomping on their faith. It happened to me, and I became a leftist without ever leaving behind my faith. The key is take it through religious and emotional-based discussions, through religious and Biblical education, an exposure to diverse people with diverse takes on faith, honoring the spirituality and culture of people’s religions while still challenging them on the interpretation of it, and discussions about abortion REDUCTION rather than making it an issue of legality or denying much-needed funding to places like Planned Parenthood — and then the politics fall into place from there.
I agree that liberals shouldn’t be so condescending to people of faith — Obama’s comment about people who “cling to guns or religion” comes to mind, which hasn’t been forgotten even 12 years later. Do you think that Christians who grew up during the era of The God Delusion and YouTube evangelical atheists will suddenly have a desire to reach across the aisle and shake hands with people who got famous mocking everything spiritual that meant something to them? But at the same time, when secular liberals and leftists themselves don’t understand what it is, exactly, that American conservative fundamentalist Christians believe and support, they’re never going to be able to convince them of anything.
For the record, I also don’t really think that leftists or liberals see politics as a religion. We see it as the inevitable reaction to a terrible reality. We live a life on a very flawed earth, and more than ever, we are exposed to seeing how bad it is for ourselves and others around us. We can watch live Instagram videos of Palestinians crying while their homes are bombed with American weapons. We have video evidence of unarmed Black people murdered by the police. We see photos of car lines outside of food banks in red states, where their government aid is nonexistent. We see BLM protestors being screamed at with hate-filled profanities from white supremacists who love Trump. If we don’t react to this, we’re going to die — and many of our oppressors and murderers will be those conservative Christians grasped in fundamentalism. Christian American nationalism is ultimate marriage of religion and politics, and we are almost there.
For me, my faith was better served when I became a leftist. The idea of a way to love your neighbor (and your enemy) in a meaningful way through giving economic justice still seems, to me, to be the best thing you can do as a Christian, and the most direct way to live out the Sermon on the Mount and create a better world for the lowliest, rather than the richest and most powerful. But I had to disregard, and be educated on, the fundamentalist view of Scripture before I could allow myself to believe that.
Remember that there are a lot of progressive people of faith out there, too. They may not be the beloved “white working class” (though there are some out there in that category, too!) but we need to start platforming those people immediately. The majority of Black evangelicals don’t vote Republican. The entirety of South America pulses with justice-based leftist, Latinx Catholics — some who have found their way to the United States. There are huge communities of LGBTQ-identifying Christians and I rarely see their perspectives shown in mainstream leftist media as part of a broader appeal to reach “Christians;” they’re sort of relinquished to the position of a fun liberal oddity. And those people have likely spent their lives navigating conservative Christianity, battling conservative interpretations of Scripture, and came out of it with liberal positions without fully leaving their faith — some of them even managed to bring their formerly bigoted relatives along for the ride! Isn’t that exactly what the left should try to accomplish? These people already did that! We should be asking them what to do, and we never do.
Taibbi and Jay are so close to getting the point, and that’s a shame. The Democratic Party is barely hanging on, they’re right. They’ve thrown progressives under the bus, and anyone who is a threat to the corporate wing of the party, no matter how cliché that sounds. And if they don’t start planning on how to appeal to new groups of disaffected voters soon, they’re going to fail miserably. But I really hope they don’t buy into the theory that conservative religious people aren’t just as fiercely political, fiercely committed to using the government as a tool for their goals as leftists are. Because they absolutely are, and have been since the advent of the Moral Majority. I’m begging you not to underestimate them. I’m actively frightened of them — and in my opinion, more leftists should be, too.
We almost fell into a stolen election with dictator-led fascism this year, and only Trump’s sheer idiocy stopped it. The blueprints are now there, however, for the next person. They won’t be like Trump. They’ll be actively more “Christian” and careful with their words and actions; no skeletons in their closet. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to fuck up something like a pandemic, and would have used it as an excuse to cultivate more power for themselves. They’d have smarter lawyers, more allies in Congress. We might be fucked. I’m increasingly of the thought process that Bernie Sanders would have been reason for “faithless electors” and judges to overturn the election in ways that Biden would not — since Biden is not nearly as much of a threat to the political corporatist machine.
As I was writing this, the Southern Baptist Convention, my husband’s childhood faith, declared that “the affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” If you don’t believe that these people worship politics as much as liberals/the left do, you’re gonna be surprised to wake up one day and find Christian nationalism at your front door.