“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
–H. Richard Niehbuhr, The Kingdom of God in America
In terms of everyday parlance, I can think of few words as singularly useless and persistently annoying as “liberal.” We have endowed this lexical chameleon with so many meanings in so many contexts that we can neither avoid using it, nor assure ourselves of what somebody means by it. In American political lingo, it served a meritorious tour of duty as a gentle stand-in for “leftist” or “left-wing” prior to undergoing a laborious and still-ongoing changing of the guard with “progressive.” In other contexts, it could easily substitute for “individualist” or “capitalist” either by its proponents, or by its equally recalcitrant opponents on the extreme left and the traditionalist right.
Used in reference to western Christianity, it becomes even trickier to work with. We all think we know “liberal” Christianity when we see it, the kind that pulls a leftist social-political wagon hitched to a Christian horse. It is the brand of Christianity that believes Jesus would have no problem with polygamy, was against the 2nd Amendment, and had very strong opinions about the carried interest loophole. It is that most non-sectarian of sects ever so exclusive in its inclusiveness, and in its firmly monistic belief that all must be pluralists under pain of…well, something.
And yet, I think describing this as Christian “liberalism” tells only part of the story. The problem with this readily recognizable manifestation of Christianity is not its leftism, but its liberalism understood differently. We find ourselves in this mental puzzle because liberalism, that sneaky little scamp, likes to change its meaning between contexts, and sometimes within the same context. We have grown so accustomed to using “liberal” and “leftist” interchangeably that we forget they do not always mean the same thing. For liberalism has that other pesky meaning, one associated with individualism, free enterprise, and the accumulation of capital. It is this flavor of liberalism what better characterizes Christian liberalism in its western expression.
Scripture says that you cannot serve both God and Mammon, but boy do we try, and liberal Christianity has so thoroughly swapped in Mammon for God that it has forgotten they are not the same thing. Like the Church of God, the Church of Mammon has her own liturgies and doctrines, but her central sacrament is Choice. All the world’s a marketplace, and all the men women merely customers. Whatever choice you make is ok, so long as it does not harm anybody else or invalidate their choice. Therefore, the mainline church has abandoned her opposition to abortion: who art thou, o person of indeterminate gender, to answer back to Mammon? To weigh abortion and find it wanting is to question another’s choice, defiling the sacrament. For this reason also the mainline church has adopted a studied ambivalence towards issues of gender and marriage: these are all merely choices. Free choice is good, God is good, therefore God smiles on our choices freely made, so long as they do not harm someone. All that matters is that the utility maximizers are happy.
A God who permits everything forbids nothing. This God is not the jealous God of the Old and New Testaments. That God at least has the decency to name sins and to rage against them. A God bound to personal choice as a sacrament is neither gracious nor merciful, for grace and mercy both imply the possibility of anger. This church has pursued not a God whose mercy matches the church’s inclusiveness, but one whose indifference matches that of the marketplace.
If we cannot, then, equate liberalism in a Christian context with leftism, it is not because leftism and Christianity are inherently incompatible, but because a particuarl kind of liberalism, one un-moored from any kind of value system, poses a great challenge for Christians. Say what one may about socialism, and I have quite I lot I can say against it, but socialists at least identify some things as bad and some things as good. Socialists look at inequality, poverty, and oppression and see them as sinful. A red flag waving socialist would find common ground with the prophet Amos, who taught that no man should have two meals a day until all have had one. A streetcorner radical could easily find himself in common cause with Malachi, who foretold that God would judge those who did not mind the widow or the orphan, and who oppress the hireling in his wages. And let us not forget that incorrigible Nazarene who warned us that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and who told the rich young ruler to sell all of his possessions and follow him.
Any accord between Christianity and radical leftism arises from their common view that something in our world has gone grotesquely wrong. Sin is real, evil is real, and both must be destroyed in order for man to do what God created him to do. Both Christianity and radical leftism – as well as radical rightism, but that’s a topic for another day – pose a threat to the world the way it is. We ought not, however, push these commonalities beyond their limits. Socialist revolutions have viewed human lives as expendable in ways no Christian should readily countenance, and the barely restrained Red tendency towards political violence as a means to its ends should warn us severely. The history of socialist regimes targeting the church should give us pause as well. The lesson the church ought to take from socialism is that we should not be afraid to call evil things evil. Like socialists, we should disdain liberal Christianity’s passive indifference to sin, and pray to God that we may beat down Satan under our feet. Unlike socialists, we should know our limits, and know that just because Christ our King is righteous, we, the church militant, are sinners still, and cannot defeat sin by our own power.