Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. But in any case, Francis has blurbed Phil’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists, and Adam has written at some length about the book, so I suppose I have no choice but to weigh in. Be true to your school.

But I haven’t been able to corral my thoughts into a coherent essay, and my next week is going to be crazy busy, so I think I will present my thoughts in all their clunking incoherence as a series of numbered points.

1.

I would be more positively disposed to Phil’s book if it had a different title, for instance:

Though Until Quite Recently Christians Could Not Have Been Leftists Because the Nation-State Model Under Which the Category “Left” Makes Sense Did Not Exist, and With the Further Qualification That Political Questions Are Largely Empirical in Nature and Therefore If I Could Be Convinced That Some Other Political Economy Did a Better Job of Fulfilling or Helping to Fulfill the Mandates of the Sermon on the Mount I Would Adopt That Political Orientation, I Believe Christians Should Be Leftists

2.

It’s noteworthy that in this interview Phil talks about how much of his money to give away in exactly the same way that my fundagelical Republican friends and family members do. “Should we be generous to the poor until it hurts us?” is a question which, for Christians, has a clear answer; “Should generosity to the poor be mediated through governmental institutions or come primarily from individual contributions and charitable NGOs?” is a question with no equally clear answer. Phil says that the teachings of Jesus demand “massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes)” — but which will it be, alms or taxes? Again, what works best is largely if not wholly an empirical question, which I think means that the decision whether to be on the Right or Left is not principial but rather pragmatic. And that lowers the stakes in the debate.

Also, I think the question above is hard to answer because it’s hard to answer this question: What’s worse, (a) a society in which the poor are in absolute terms poorer but are closer in income to the rich, or (b) a society in which poverty-as-such is greatly reduced but the rich are ever-more-filthy rich? That is: What’s the key problem here, poverty-as-such or inequality? And I don’t think the Sermon on the Mount (or the Bible as a whole) tells us.

Phil writes, “God wants all of us to acknowledge that love by lifting up those at the bottom of our social arrangements. The Bible is clearer about that then it is about most of the theological and ethical issues we fight about. And the only durable way to do this is to lift up that bottom.” Well, amen to that. But what if the best way to lift up that bottom also lifts the top? That’s basically the argument Deirdre McCloskey makes in her massive Bourgeois Trilogy, about which I’ve written a bit here and here — really important work pointing to certain indubitable facts about the astonishingly swift and great rise in wealth that has occurred throughout the world during the reign of capitalism. In my experience, most leftists just pretend that none of this even happened, but the more acute ones agree that it has happened but also that capitalism has done all the good work it can do and now needs to give way to the next stage of economic development. That, however, requires subtle and detailed argumentation, and it’s a lot easier to shout “CAPITALISM IMMISERATES” even when that’s obviously not true. Unless …

Unless you are referring not to material misery — which capitalism has dramatically reduced — but rather to the social and psychological pain of inequality. Then the question becomes: Is material improvement coupled with increased inequality and therefore decreased social solidarity a deal we’re willing to make?

Or, to return to specifically Christian terms: What does Jesus primarily want, (a) deliverance of the poor from their poverty or (b) social solidarity among us all, even if that means a reduction in collective wealth? Some people, of course, will say that we don’t have to choose, that we can all together ascend the golden escalator to universal wealth. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

3.

If I had been making Phil’s case, I might have said something like this:

To my conservative/libertarian brothers and sisters, greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! Obiously, we all believe that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are binding upon us, and also that the teachings of the Hebrew Prophets are equally binding upon us (because the whole of the Bible is the Word of God). That means that we are obligated to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, the despised, the outcast, the stranger. But the Bible does not tell us how we are to do that necessary work. You don’t think it should be done through the government, which, though I do not agree, I understand. But that means that you really need to raise your game. If we are not going to redistribute resources — that is, share our blessings — through governmental action, then we need as individuals and families and churches to give until it hurts. We need to increase our support of charitable organizations that do this work. We need to make sure our churches preach this Biblical message. We need to encourage our fellow Christians to give more generously — to see lifting up the poor not as a nice thing, not as an acceptable option, but an absolute Gospel mandate. Some of us (some individual Christians, some families, some churches) obey this mandate, but not all of us, not nearly enough of us, else we would not see so many people among us who can’t afford to buy healthy food for their families, can’t afford safe and clean housing, can’t afford decent health care. There are enough of us to make a far bigger difference than we make, and our goal should be that the whole world says that they know us by our love. We don’t have to do it through governmental intervention, but we have to do it, and if you can’t see any way to make that happen on the scale that it needs to happen … well, then maybe we should revisit the question of whether the government might, after all, be the best instrument to pursue this common good.

And indeed you can find an argument that touches on some of these themes in an essay I wrote in 2005.

4.

My biggest Amen goes to this paragraph from Phil’s book:

Jesus takes sides in particular situations — the victim of violence over the perpetrator; the sufferer over the oppressor. But I also think Jesus is playing for all the marbles. As he 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.