A Call for a Religious Left

I would not blame you if you have taken little interest in JD Vance, the recently inaugurated Vice President of the United States, beyond his alleged penchant for couch copulation and newly enshrined status as professional lackey for Trump. However, I would like to bring to your attention a particular detail of his life: his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 and explicit citation of his faith in his politics. 

Vance, as far as I can tell, for I cannot know what truly rests in the heart of another, is a genuinely devout Catholic and married to a Hindu South Asian first-generation immigrant. At the same time, he has hitched his metaphorical wagon, as have innumerable pastors, preachers, priests, and lay Christians alike, to the idolatrous cult of personality that Trump has gathered around himself, which is, in my humble opinion, a deep betrayal of all it means to follow Christ. Even as I write these words, the new administration has declared that ICE agents are at license to make deportation arrests in schools and places of worship, a move that Vance himself has defended over and against that of his own faith – he has publicly disagreed with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ own statement roundly condemning the new immigration policies. I guess one of the two greatest Commandments (Mark 12:30–31) means nothing to him. 

I do not single out Vance to lampoon his particular character, politics, or faith, but as an exemplar of the state of the religious right in America, now controlling the monstrous dragon that is the United States. I bring all this to your attention to make a point about the wider influence of religiosity, namely Christianity, on the clear and present danger of the American Right: an influence that anyone opposed to the Damocles’ sword of authoritarian reactionary power looming over the most vulnerable people in this country at this very moment must respond to. But how? 

I want to be very clear at the outset that I am not advocating that the left should base its resistance to the religious right on some combination of dismissive atheism and appeals to the ideal of a complete separation of church and state. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly support religious pluralism and oppose any measure that uses the state to forcefully impose any religious law, doctrine, or practice on people. However, I have gathered that, broadly speaking, the left, however you want to nebulously define it, has swallowed the Enlightenment-derived secularism pill so completely that it implicitly dismisses the importance of religion in public life and has taken church-state separation to mean that the individual’s faith should be kept entirely to themselves, that it has no place to inform one’s own political views, and cannot be cited as a genuine motive for political action.  

Without getting into the historical weeds of how such a puerile attitude towards the intersection of religion and politics has come about, I would like to point out the simple fact, as I see it, that this approach has manifestly failed to answer to reality. Trump’s victory in November was in no small part due to the rallying of conservative Christians, namely Evangelicals but other denominations as well, around him as the supposedly ‘divinely ordained savior’ of America. The right has never, and will never, care about the ‘traditions’ and ‘norms’ of our so-called liberal democracy, especially not any notion of secularism or pluralism. But what is more important is the fact that religious people, of any faith and political persuasion, are going to turn to their religiously informed morals and most deeply held beliefs when engaging in politics, whether we like it or not. The consideration before us is not whether religion should inform politics, because it already has and will continue to do so, but how. 

I already know what might be the reflexive response to this argument, “isn’t ‘religion’ and especially Christianity inherently misogynistic, conservative, patriarchal, oppressive, and that’s why so many Christians today are so enraptured by the right?” I would respond first with the fact that there is a strong historical tradition of progressive, leftist, and even socialist movements rooted in Christianity and religion in general, both in America (John Brown, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West) and internationally (Liberation Theology, Leo Tolstoy, Michael O’Flanagan). This is not just history, and there are more progressive and leftist Christians today than you might think, with the Episcopalian Bishop of Washington DC, Mariann Budde, recently receiving much news coverage and right-wing temper tantrums over her impassioned sermon against Trump’s vitriolic hate. Speaking for myself, my Catholic faith and my socialist political convictions are inseparable, however scandalized this may make my fellow Catholics and leftists alike. I find my resistance to the capitalist order confirmed and strengthened by the praxis of figures like Dorothy Day, Gustavo Gutierrez, and St. Óscar Romero. 

My second response is that the all-too-common painting of religion and/or Christianity as inherently reactionary and bigoted is to give into the propaganda of the right and tacitly agree with the horrific and hypocritical manipulation of religion for the justification of oppression and violence. It also ignores the existence and experiences of innumerable marginalized people of faith across every intersection of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. To fail to offer a way to both live one’s faith and be genuinely progressive is to cede the incredibly important cultural ground of religion to the right, and it runs counter to the reality of the enormously diverse and complex identities that we like to call ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity.’ 

The question I put to the left is this: can we really afford to cede the discourses of religion and faith, indisputably one of the most impactful aspects of human society both historically and in the present, to reactionaries and fascists? Are we willing to get over ourselves and take seriously what is an essential part of most of the world population’s life experience? Are we willing to begin the work of presenting a genuine alternative to, instead of a facile dismissal of, the rank exploitation and manipulation of religious values for propagating hatred, genocide, dehumanization, and the active destruction of human flourishing?