Stuck in the Middle (or Maybe on the Margin)

One of the unforseen consequences of President Bush’s re-election has been the new attention suddenly given to liberal or progressive Christians. Because Bush’s victory has widely (if perhaps erroneously) been attributed to religious “moral values” voters, some secular liberals have recognized the need to reach out to religious people, and left-of-center Christians have made new efforts to distinguish themselves from their conservative brethren.

However, progressive Christians are by no means a homogenous group. For starters, we have to distinguish between politically liberal Christians and theologically liberal Christians. I take a “theological liberal” to be someone who has a more or less revisionist understanding of traditional Christian doctrines like the resurrection, the virgin birth, etc. Theological liberals tend to be religious pluralists, seeing all religions as human responses to the divine and thus (potentially at least) equally true and salvific.

I think it’s fair to say that theological liberals tend to be political liberals, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Some Christians are politically liberal (or at least not conservative) because they’re theologically orthodox. N. T. Wright, for example, widely regarded as a defender of orthodoxy, has said that debt relief for poor nations and a just form of globalization are the most pressing political issues of our day. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action combine a traditional evangelical piety and theology with opposition to war and militarism, progressive stances on economics and conservative positions on sexuality and abortion.

In fact, the close association between conservative or orthodox theology and conservative politics seems in many ways to be a uniquely American phenomenon. John Paul II, a hero to many American conservatives, has been sharply critical of American capitalism and foreign policy. The current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has been caricatured as a knee-jerk leftist for his opposition to the war in Iraq, but he has also soundly critiqued such thelogical revisionists as John Shelby Spong and has also been associated with the pro-life movement in the UK.

These examples show, I should think, that Christian orthodoxy does not automatically go hand-in-hand with conservative politics as understood in the USA. Not only is there no necessary connection between the two, there are good grounds for questioning whether they are even consistent in many respects.

But the examples I cited show also that there is no simplistic equation between Christianity and liberal politics either. No one would, I think, accuse John Paul or N. T. Wright of being liberals in any conventional sense. This means that the answer is not a “Christian Left” that is merely the mirror image of the Christian Right, but something else entirely. I imagine it is tempting for Christians who oppose aspects of the conservative agenda to hitch their wagon to the essentially secular political agenda of the left. But this would be the same mistake that their conservative counterparts tend to make.

This is why I don’t like the idea of “Christian Progressivism” any more than the idea of “Christian Conservatism.” Both risk making a certain political ideology dominant and trimming their theological sails accordingly. This is not to say that Christians should never get involved with secular political coalitions, but rather they should maintain their independence from them. Maybe this means restricting alliances to an issue-by-issue basis; Christians might find themselves aligned with conservatives on issues like pornography or abortion and with liberals on war or anti-poverty measures.

Of course, saying this presupposes that there is an identifiably “Christian” stance that is independent of both conservatism and liberalism, not something that everyone will concede. For what it’s worth, I incline to the view that a “consistent life” or “seamless garment” ethic does come close to such a position, but there are certainly few churches that teach that, much less a political constituency that takes it as its organizing principle.