What Christians Can Learn From the Left

By David Mills Published on March 6, 2018

Things may get better for Christians, or they may get worse. In either case, we’ll challenge our society in some way. We don’t quite fit anywhere. We never will, because we’re aliens in this world, as the Apostle Peter put it. And we know things the world doesn’t know.

Faithful Christians will always tell the world that it ought to do something it doesn’t want to do. We’ll always be the burr under the saddle, the kid who says the emperor’s naked, the guy who points out the elephant in the room, the teacher who insists we color within the lines. We’ll always be that sign of contradiction that the prophet Simeon saw in Jesus and the Jews speaking to Paul saw in His followers. We will speak as prophets.

Here’s the problem. Being prophets tempts us to act like jerks. It encourages us to do pretty much everything Jesus said not to do. To hate the other guys, for example, or to despair and give up. It’s hard being a dissenter without becoming less Christ-like than we should be. Hard for many of us, anyway.

People experienced in the life of dissent and resistance can tell us something about that life. The political left shares the Christians’ sense of alienation, of speaking truths our society does not want to hear. Todd Gitlin helped found Students for a Democratic Society in the early sixties and was an early leader of the anti-war movement. He now teaches at Columbia. Gitlin described his experience in the book Letters to a Young Activist. We can learn a lot from him.

Gitlin is by no means a religious believer, but he is a reflective and morally serious man. He’s in that odd position of having firm and even absolute moral commitments, commitments to which he’s given his life, that he cannot ground in any objective understanding of the world. He would save himself some problems and would see deeper into the role of the dissenter were he a Christian, but he still tells Christians much that is useful about the life of public resistance.

Gitlin’s Warnings

Here are five warnings gleaned from Letters to a Young Activist. He also has more positive lessons, which I’ll take up another time.

First, avoid rage even though it feels good. Wickedness should anger us. That anger should move us to action. Remember Jesus cleansing the temple of the money-changers. But anger hits us like an addictive drug and we way too easily start using it for the high.

Gitlin sees this and distinguishes anger from rage. By “rage,” he means the kind of controlling, driving anger that activists can feel against those they’ve identified as the bad guys. He explains: “I know from experience that something happens to anger when it gets down inside you and stagnates. It congeals into rage, more diffuse and less manageable than anger. … Roughly, anger has an address, rage is broadcast. Anger wants change while rage demands, above all, punishment.”

He warns against rage because it drives others away. “You want to change minds, so you don’t burn bridges. Burning bridges is the route of the fundamentalist who prefers the world purified but embattled, each pain a pleasure, each Antichrist a confirmation of Christ.” We can easily decide we won’t even deal with the people on the other side, because they’re just too wrong to be bothered with. Jesus never stopped loving His enemies. He didn’t treat them as beneath response.

Jesus’s Rules For Radicals

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

But Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.

I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.

Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.

— Taken from Luke 6

Contrarianism and Engagement

Second, do not be a contrarian. People who find themselves opposed on principle to their society will feel the desire to just say no. All the time. It’s easier than keeping up the fight.

You must be “countercyclical,” Gitlin says. Move in the opposite direction of the world, move against the flow. But don’t do it “in the persnickety sense of the contrarian, who predictably follows orders but in reverse: He is enslaved to no, rebelling for the sake of rebellion. Contrarianism is a perverse submission to power. It refuses initiative.”

Third, don’t settle into a bubble, but stay engaged with those you disagree with. Gitlin again speaks from his observation of the political radicals of the sixties. “Persevere, but don’t bury yourself in an army of the right-minded,” he says. “Beware the perilous rapture of shrinking your world to the tribe of the saved, the cheerleading good guys who brandish the same slogans, curse the same enemies, thrill to the same saints.”

He explains what happens when you bury yourself: “When you live in an echo chamber where your cheers boom and cheerleading substitutes for thought, you enclose yourself in a sect, though you may call it a movement. The world of the saved substitutes for the world as it is, full of the unsaved.” It’s the unsaved that dissenters of every sort need to influence, and they’re also the people dissenters tend to forget.

Discouragement and Optimism

Fourth, don’t get discouraged, even though you will always be a minority. Gitlin learned this from his own experience. “For most of the sixties,” he writes, “the political side was not so fashionable.” The Vietnam War he and his peers opposed was popular and stayed popular for years, especially (unexpectedly) on college campuses.

In the end, however, the protesters won and their view of Vietnam and of American power continues to influence the public debate. They were the nerds, the weirdos, the wonks, reading and writing and protesting when the great majority of their peers felt at home in the world and had a good time. Yet they formed the world we now live in.

Fifth, don’t be optimistic.
“Optimism is balm,” Gitlin writes. “Certitude, not agnosticism, makes the blood race — not least in America, which cherishes a victory culture.” The feeling “will work on you like a drug.” The radicals of the sixties failed, he says, because they kept misreading the world around them and overestimating their chances of success. Their optimism made them excuse every left-wing tyrant as long as he’s anti-American, for example, because they could convince themselves that the tyrant represented the liberated future.

“If you believe such things,” he writes his young activist, “you are riding for a fall — not only a moral fall but a practical one, for your cannot possibly win more than a smidgen of popular support for positions that defy common sense. … Please go on leaving the victory marches and the catch tunes to the tinny bands. The long-distance runner listens to the blues.”

The Long Struggle

The political radical and the Christian see problems when others don’t. Gitlin writes, starkly, “Living with the knowledge that our country perpetuates moral abominations is an everyday burden.” We will think of abortion, euthanasia, callous disregard for the poor, the suffering, and the powerless, experimentation on embryos.

It’ll be a long struggle, and people like Todd Gitlin tell us something useful about the struggle. We know something Gitlin doesn’t know. We know that in the end, God shall wipe away every tear, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain. For the world in which we live as aliens and dissenters will pass away. The long-distance runner listens to the blues, but also, the Christian would add, Mozart.

 

“What We Can Learn From the Left” is adapted from one of David Mills’ weekly columns for Aleteia. To read others, click here.

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