Politics and Testimonies

Book Review for "Why Christians Should Be Leftists" by Phil Christman

“Testifying.” That is the title of Phil Christman’s first chapter, but it might have been a more apt title for the book as a whole. Christman purports to explain Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Judged against that objective, the book comes up short. Taken as a personal testimonial, though, the book has more to recommend it—and a lot that may resonate with Latter-day Saint experience.

Christman tells how he grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home and later attended Calvin College. Although struggling to keep and live the faith, he was afflicted with doubts. Why did God not speak to him, Phil Christman, in the ways he seemed to speak to other people? “When I prayed, I could not banish from my mind the fear that I was simply talking to myself,” he recalls. And he had the nagging fear that “God didn’t love me.”

Some LDS readers—or, I can say for certain, at least one—will identify with such struggles.

And then, a bit like Martin Luther (and, again, like some LDS inquirers), Christman was blessed with an angst-relieving “epiphany,” as he calls it. With two epiphanies, actually, or perhaps one epiphany with two components.

The first component was a sort of intuitive spiritual realization of the Second Great Commandment. One afternoon, while reading scriptures with a group of college classmates, Christman was inwardly beset with his usual doubts; he was also feeling forlorn because of a romantic breakup. And then, all of a sudden, “a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which—this is as close as I can get to summarizing it—each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting.” Christman suddenly knew that “no second spent with them or with any person could be anything other than a gift.” And he experienced “something more than happy”; he felt “the possibility of universal solidarity” with the rest of humanity.

Among the thousands of LDS accounts that I have heard in which people tell how they “gained a testimony,” I have not heard anyone put it in exactly this way. But some of the testimonies are at least in this vicinity.

For Christman, the rush of spiritual insight did not end with this experience of love and solidarity; there was a political component as well. He had been raised to be a conservative Republican, an orientation he still maintained up to the moment of his epiphany. But he explains that “[o]nce I had, even for only a moment, imagined the possibility of living in that kind of feeling permanently, I was doomed to be some kind of leftist. For me, the fate of being a Christian and being on the left politically are, if not identical, at least closely linked.”

For the rest of the book, Christman elaborates the content of that political revelation or realization. His primary focus is on economics and property: Christianity requires the repudiation of capitalism in favor of massive wealth redistribution and some kind of strong socialism. (Or perhaps communism: the differences between these, he thinks, are mostly “vibes-based.” Marx’s Das Capital is still the “most searching and important statement on what we call capitalism.”) In addition, Christman talks much on the usual themes of pervasive racism and sexism, and in the usual ways.

He says less about social issues like marriage and sexuality, maybe because not much really needs to be said. “I knew more of God’s care and love,” he reports, “in a church where the minister was a lesbian than I did in several churches where that lesbian would never have been allowed to serve, because we were so concerned with, ironically, obeying Jesus. For me, that’s the end of the debate” (emphasis added). Hmm.

I have good friends—including LDS friends—whose similar heartfelt, heart-based convictions on such subjects seem likewise to have been delivered, directly and incontrovertibly, from experience with a friend or family member. Conversely, if you are a stony-hearted soul like me to whom the spirit (or the spirit of love?) does not disclose political or social truths in this unmediated way, and for whom Christman’s thinking on sexuality accordingly seems to be a staggering oversimplification of an extremely difficult and complicated issue, you will likely find much of Christman’s argumentation about economics, politics, history, and foreign policy to be equally unsatisfying.

On socialism or communism: Maybe you would like to see Christman’s moving recitations of the human suffering associated with capitalism balanced with discussions of the enormities and atrocities that Marxist regimes under Lenin and Stalin and Mao have inflicted on the world. You won’t find such discussions in this book. On leftism generally: Maybe, like the American founders, you are concerned about the dangers of entrusting governments with too much power—governments that today are equipped with awesome surveillance capacities and overwhelming coercive force (perhaps even including, in Christman’s perception, “cops [who] routinely murder, and do shakedowns, and commit rape”). If so, you may not be entirely reassured by Christman’s dismissive observation that corporations and churches have power too.

In a different review and for a different kind of book, I might try to go through the various issues Christman addresses and explain why his arguments seem to me insufficient. But that would be a very lengthy review. And a tedious one. If you are interested in these subjects you will find no arguments here that you have not already heard, over and over again probably, and often more carefully presented. In any case, a methodical analysis would not be the most apt response to this kind of book.

Viewing the book instead as a kind of testimony may allow for a more charitable response. With testimonies, you may have noticed, few if any object to content that has been repeated millions of times by millions of people. Such redundancy is expected and may even be a virtue; so, too, what we might call “simplicity.” Testimonies tend to be direct and simple in their message, not nuanced or analytical. When was the last time you heard a fair-minded presentation in testimony meeting of the pro and con arguments for Book of Mormon historicity? That is not what testimonies do nor what they are supposed to do.

True to the genre, Christman’s treatment of political issues is consistently simplistic. Indeed, Christman aspires to simplicity. Thus, he asserts that “the most important political ideas can mostly be explained in terms that a bright sixteen-year-old could understand.” He acknowledges that some other subjects—science, math, even literature—are complicated, so that “you might have to really grind for a few years” in order to understand them. But not politics: these issues really are simple. “Some things are rocket science; political philosophy isn’t one of those things.”

This assumption pervades Christman’s presentations of history: it is a simple story of greedy, arrogant lords and later greedy, arrogant capitalists exploiting humble, hard-working peasants, slaves, and employees. It follows, almost automatically, that we (meaning the government) should seize the vast excess wealth of the rich and distribute it to the poor; that way, everyone could have a good life. Christman briefly discusses major thinkers—Aristotle, Marx, Mill, Hayek, Rawls, and others—but the discussions consistently reduce these thinkers’ philosophies to sound bites that a high school sophomore would have no trouble grasping and reacting to. At least one of these thinkers is on Christman’s side. The others, insofar as they do not favor massive redistribution, are just rationalizing the prejudices and unjust privileges of the well-off, including themselves. Better not to corrupt yourself, the author implies, by engaging too seriously with such complications.

To be sure, seemingly in tension with his assertion that politics is simple, Christman also occasionally says that “the question of ‘making sure our values are the right ones’ is irreducibly complex.” He says that sometimes, but does he actually believe it? If he did, wouldn’t he attempt a more nuanced discussion, not limiting himself to cartoonish depictions of the people and positions he opposes? In fact, his operative assumption—one that pervades the book—seems to be that the irredeemable evils of capitalism and hence the truth and necessity of socialism should be apparent to anyone who is not blinded by greed or selfishness. The implication is that if you do not find Christman’s positions convincing, what you need is not more careful reflection or more balanced analysis. You need to rise above your prejudice, privilege, and greed. If you do that, it seems, you should receive your own testimony of leftism immediately and intuitively in the same way that as a forlorn college student Christman received his.

Whatever its merits, to LDS readers this way of thinking should be familiar. How often in a seminary class, a Gospel Essentials lesson, or a testimony meeting do we hear people support some religious proposition or conviction with ostensible reasons that would crumble in a moment under any sort of disinterested criticism? And yet it would be a mistake just to dismiss such testimonies. Instead, we listen to and even appreciate them, and we understand that no one is supposed to judge the testifier’s convictions only or mainly on the strength of his or her stated reasons. Often these ostensible reasons are just the vestments covering claims of faith that ultimately must be known or rejected “by the Spirit.” And to receive the guidance of the Spirit, we need to be—what? Not more learned or analytical, but rather more humble, pure, and discerning.

To say that Christman’s style of presentation is familiar is not to commend his conclusions. I have reservations about this kind of thinking—thinking in which soft or simplistic reasons are produced in defense of a prior inspiration that basically needs no justification—even in church settings, and even with respect to matters like the Book of Mormon or the Restoration. And these misgivings are magnified when the ostensible revealed or intuited truths are about capitalism, law enforcement, or same-sex marriage.

Let me bluntly bear my own political (anti?)testimony: I do not believe God or any God-substitute actually does reveal political truths in this way. As with science or math, I believe, so with politics: if you want to be a responsible person, you “have to really grind” your way to your convictions. I also don’t believe you can go directly from the Golden Rule or the Parable of the Laborers to Karl Marx—or Bernie Sanders. (Or, for that matter, from Captain Moroni to Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump.) I fear that such thinking, or such indolent self-delusions, contribute to the impassioned polarization and the decline of serious, honest dialogue that are so conspicuous in our society today.

So if you tell me that more evidence or more careful deliberation would show the error of my views and would persuade me of yours, we have something to discuss. You might be right. Come, let us reason together. But if you proclaim with righteous zeal that I hold to my pernicious and self-serving opinions only because I am determined to rationalize my unjust privilege and my status as an oppressor, a productive and cordial conversation is unlikely to follow.

And yet, like many others, I have often been uplifted by a testimony even when what was said seemed on its face unsatisfactory. Examples abound, but here is one: A good-hearted brother in my ward has shared his testimony of the resurrection by telling a story (more than once, I’m afraid) about a little girl’s coffin that was dug up and found to be empty. Like most ward members, I find the story to be less than compelling. Even so, I can appreciate this brother’s faith and his good-heartedness. At the very least, I can muster up some love and respect for him and, perhaps at some level, his faith (if not his story) even strengthens mine.

Closer to the political realm, members of my ward—and my family, and my other associations—hold a variety of political convictions (MAGA, anti-MAGA; conservative, progressive, etc.) as fervently as Christman holds his. I share some of these convictions, and I am appalled by others, and there is some overlap between what Christman and I deplore. And I sometimes wonder how people whom I know to be intelligent and at least as faithful and prayerful as I am could possibly hold such noxious and dangerous opinions—and for stated reasons that are manifestly defective. And yet, there they are. Or perhaps I should say, here we are in all of our faded glory—the profoundly loveable, infinitely precious, fallen, exasperatingly obtuse, glorious children of God.

It is a puzzling phenomenon, but one for which I actually have come to feel at least a measure of gratitude. Because, for one thing, however wrong-headed a person’s political views may seem, if I am sympathetic enough, I will usually see that there is some truth or value contained in these views. Something that I need to consider, and that without the benefit of their expressions I might overlook.

This point holds emphatically for Christman’s book. His presentation may be brazenly one-sided, but that one side does contain important even if unbalanced truths. I don’t believe you can move as easily as he does directly to socialism from the injustices in Western history or the evils of capitalism. Still, the injustices and evils are real enough, and it would be dishonest and debilitating to ignore them. And although it is uncharitable and lazy to dismiss thinking that disagrees with your own as mere rationalization of prejudice and self-interest, even so, such rationalizing is common enough. Isn’t it? Can we be complacently certain that this isn’t what we are doing?

Even more importantly, it is a blessing to realize that you can work together—on a ward council or in a bishopric or Relief Society presidency—with people whose politics seem to you reprehensible. You can even love these people, deeply and sincerely. You can do this in part because you share with them a faith in something more fundamental—something that Latter-day Saints, and Christians generally, call “the gospel.” And that experience can help us realize that we can love and work with people who do not share a religious faith. That the imago dei that makes you and me and everyone else intrinsically worthy of love and respect is not dependent on, and thus not defeasible because of, either our religious beliefs or our often misguided views about economics and politics.

Christman’s political testimony makes this point powerfully as well. In fact, this is basically the essence of the spiritual component of his youthful epiphany. Through much of the book, actually, I had the uneasy sense that this component—the conviction that every single person is “infinitely precious and infinitely interesting”—had mostly been eclipsed by the political component. The world as he described it was basically divided into two classes: the greedy oppressors—evil, odious, with no apparent redeeming features—and the oppressed whom Christman equates with the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers of the Beatitudes. He has nothing but admiration for the latter class (“Jesus basically says, ‘Blessed are the people whose lives look absolutely terrible’”), saying that “According to Jesus, losers define what humanity is and should be.” But it often seemed that the former class—the wicked oppressors—were coming in for nothing but condemnation and contempt.

At times, though, and especially toward the end of the book (and perhaps because he is not merely a leftist but a Christian leftist), Christman moves back to the spiritual theme. At a time when both the world and the church struggle to live with profound political differences that often have the character of clashing religious faiths, his final chapter pleads for a humility needed by all of us, be we Republicans or Democrats, Marxists or libertarians or anarchists. Invoking the parable of the sheep and the goats, he observes “that ‘goat’ and ‘sheep’ are roles that all of us put on and discard, unconsciously, as we move through a world that is simply too big for any of us to really know what the hell we are doing.” He notes that in the New Testament, “Jesus draws together his disciples in a way that not only crosses ideological lines, but victim/oppressor ones: Matthew is a functionary for an unjust regime, while several of his other disciples are activists against that very regime.” And his final paragraph reminds us (still perhaps just a bit condescendingly) of God’s encompassing and politically nonpartisan love:

As [Jesus] judges the oppressor’s actions, he also sees every second of the life that took the oppressor to that moment, the poor moral formation the oppressor received from his parents (and that they in turn received), the ideological lies that that oppressor started to learn before he was old enough to notice or think about them, the person that that oppressor might have been had he been born in more auspicious circumstances. Jesus sees the thing that Jesus himself, as the second person of the Trinity and God’s creative Word, formed in the womb. And he wants to redeem that too. He wants all of it. He wants all of us.

He wants all of us. For that urgently needed reminder in a time of strife, thank you, Brother Christman.

Professor Steven D. Smith is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of law and religion, constitutional law, and torts. Smith is also the co-executive director of the USD’s Institute for Law & Religion.

John Singer Sargent, Thistles, c. 1883–1889, Art Institute of Chicago.