Response to A Call for a Religious Left

Dear Quest,

I am writing to express my admiration for Caleb Stanco's opinion piece last week ("Opinion: A Call for a Religious Left," 7 Feb. 2025), but also to point out that its title was perhaps misleading. As I understand it, Stanco is not making a call for the current American left as we understand it to suddenly become religious (like the vociferous and increasingly dangerous "religious" right). He is instead, I think, gesturing toward two critical facts. 

The first of these is that most people, of whatever political persuasion, left or right or anywhere in between, are always already making political decisions informed by private metaphysical commitments — for what else shall we call a "personal ethical code," or a fervent devotion to social justice, let alone an orientation toward the content of the Qur'an or the Torah or the Diamond Sutra or the Sermon on the Mount?  Indeed, is there not something religious, or nearly religious, about, say, the cult of self-actualization that informs even the most dyed-in-the wool libertarians or the most ardent atheists?  Are they not placing some thing or concept — freedom, pleasure, science, technology, the self, the will to power — at the center of their ethical (and thus political) universes? Stanco rightly calls out the traditional left for its naïveté in thinking that, at the level of individual human beings, religion and its metaphysical analogues can ever really not be a factor in human decision-making. As thinkers as diverse as Charles Taylor and Bruno Latour have suggested, we have never truly been secular.

The second critical point is that there is no need to call for a Christian left: it is already here, and has always been here, beginning with Jesus of Nazareth himself, who shared his table with the poor and outcast, prostitutes and publicans, whose earliest disciples were politically marginalized Galilean fishermen. All human institutions, of course, are imperfect and corruptible. The history of the Church throughout the Middle Ages and beyond has shown the dangers of what can happen when Christians too complacently align themselves with political powers or social hegemonies; the contemporary American religious right continues to perpetuate just such an error, practically identifying itself with a cruel, even rabid, patriotic nationalism. Nonetheless, so many of the core Christian teachings — love of one's neighbor, the recognition of basic human dignity, the equality of all human beings before God, the exaltation of humility over arrogance, of mercy over vengeance, of peace over violence, etc. — have long informed the normative Western secular understanding of human rights and of basic decency. Many, many Christians, and their churches, still uphold these values today. I might mention especially the so-called "mainline" Protestant denominations (Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ and others), but there are also significant leftist, even socialist, strains in the Roman Catholic Church (as Stanco points out), in Eastern Orthodoxy, and among many other smaller denominations. These are people who do outreach to the poor and houseless; who preach tolerance and understanding; who oppose racism, antisemitism, and all manner of bigotry; who fight for environmental,social, and economic justice; who advocate for universal health care, who might march for gender equality and reproductive rights, who open their churches as sanctuaries to refugees and the undocumented; who expend resources paying legal fees to challenge ICE deportations; and so on. Many of these denominations also ordain women and LGBTQ+ persons as ministers and priests.  

Finally, I'll point out that, despite the prominence of "Atheism" as the prime term of the college's unofficial motto, many manifestly leftist Reed students I have encountered over the years do consider themselves Christians of one stripe or another, even if they are fairly quiet about it because of the hostility this sometimes incurs from other students; there are also many Christians among Reed's staff and faculty, myself included, and there are many other great Reedies who operate quietly in other faith traditions as well. There is no need to call for a religious left: it is already here, for those who would have eyes to see it.