The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anthony A. J. Williams
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509542833
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      In June 2020 then-US President Donald Trump staged a photo-op outside Washington DC’s St John’s Episcopal Church. Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, which had engulfed Washington and other inner cities since the racist murder of George Floyd a week previously, Trump walked from the White House to the church building, held aloft a Bible for the assembled press, and then walked back again.1 Trump’s aim in this ‘religious performance’ was to signal his faith commitment and Christian credentials to a voter base of white evangelicals.2 Predictably, many of these – three-quarters of whom would cast their vote for Trump that November – were delighted with the president’s performance.3 One such, a Republican candidate for the Florida Senate, described scenes of joy as his family watched Trump on TV: ‘My mother just shouted out, “God give him strength! He’s doing a Jericho walk!” … My mother started crying […] she started speaking in tongues […] I thought, look at my president! He’s establishing the Lord’s kingdom in the world.’4 Encapsulated in this one example is all we know – or think we know – about the relationship between Christianity and politics.

      Yet, not everybody was impressed with Donald Trump’s religious signalling. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, led the denunciations.

      A statement by the Episcopal bishops of New England also criticised Trump’s ‘disgraceful and morally repugnant’ actions, reaffirming the church’s mission to ‘serve our Lord Jesus Christ’s higher purpose: to extend love and mercy and justice for all, and especially for those whose life, liberty, and very humanity is threatened by the persistent sin of systemic racism and the contagion of white supremacy’.6 This is an entirely different interaction between Christianity and politics than the one many of us have come to expect.

      The critical responses to Trump’s photo-op and the positioning of the church as an ally to the poor, the oppressed, and the mistreated are not an aberration or an anomaly. The Episcopalian bishops of Washington DC and New England, and others who spoke out, represent a long tradition of socialist and radical religion. The link between the (white) evangelical church of the United States and the economically neo-liberal, socially conservative agenda of the Republican Party should not be assumed to be the default setting for Christian political thought and action. The bishops’ intervention reminds us that many Christians have taken socially liberal or progressive positions. Many others have adopted left-wing, socialist critiques of capitalism and have sought a world in which laissez-faire individualism is replaced with a commitment to co-operation, collectivism and economic equality. In the pages that follow we examine this tradition, the Christian Left.

      The Exodus account – so crucial for theologies of liberation – was God breaking into history, bringing liberty to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. The Egyptian rulers and slave-owners are made to represent the capitalist class, the global centre, the one per cent, the white supremacists, the patriarchy. God chooses to identify rather with the exploited. The rest of the Old Testament bears witness to the freedom with which God sets his people free – the land laws of Israel, such as the year of jubilee, are designed to prevent those who have recognised the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man from slipping back into unequal, oppressive relationships with one another:

      When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.

      You shall not oppress your neighbour or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

      You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour.

      (Leviticus 19:10–11, 13–15)

      This ‘prophetic-liberating tradition’, as feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether referred to it, reaches its culmination in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.8 In the Christian Left understanding of the Gospel, Christ comes to proclaim and to inaugurate a new order in which economically and socially oppressive relationships are abolished, the first become last, and the world is turned upside down. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, sings Mary upon hearing the news of the miraculous conception. ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty’ (Luke 1:46, 51–3). The British Anglo-Catholic Stewart Headlam regarded this Magnificat as ‘the hymn of the universal revolution’, ‘the Marseillaise of humanity’, the heralding of God’s Kingdom of righteousness and justice upon the earth.9 This Kingdom, those on the Christian Left argue, is not a distant eschatological promise – ‘pie in the sky when we die, by and by’ – but, as exemplified in Christ, something to be fought for and won in the here and now.