The following argues, in as non-partisan a fashion as I can, for Christians to leave behind the designations of Christian ‘Right” and Christian “Left.” Why? Read on…
As we approach the next national election, Christians will encounter throngs of pundits on page and screen urging them to support a political party. With those appeals, we will hear diverse voices within the Christian commentariat on public life unite to denounce the apparently precious, rather jejune notion of “pox on both your houses politics” or “beyondism.” There will be regular reminders that those who have emerged from political immaturity know that being a reliable member of a major party is the way to get things done in a representative democracy like our own.
A ritualistic political dance will follow. The Christian “Left” will waste no time claiming that Democrats care about and for the poor, in whose service Scripture tells us we participate in nothing less than the life of God, and that the Democrats are relatively likely to oppose torture and wars of choice— while claiming Republicans largely do not. Thus Christians should vote for Democrats. The Christian “Right” will bluntly remind them that the Republican party platform and many of its candidates affirm the right to life, and that there is no issue more fundamental than affirming and protecting life and the dignity of life. To deny this fact is at best to act upon a grievously flawed moral calculus, or to offer demonstrable support for intrinsically immoral acts.
In a presidential election, these warnings have real value: on this occasion one must choose a representative of one party or another or abstain altogether. With some additional Supreme Court appointments, for example, the election of a Presidential candidate might mean that the legality of abortion could be returned to legislators. Even then, however, the task of persuading those legislators and the electorate as a whole to support pro-life legislation would only have just begun. One hopes that on the other side, torture and preëmptive war might come to an end or at least be put on the defensive with a new administration, and that needs to be seriously considered. Is it then true that such persuasion and political action, on abortion or torture or other life issues, can best be accomplished through the labors of a single political party, and that only political adolescents will hope for something “beyond” those labors?
In historical and political terms, and answer is a resounding no. To make for effective pro-life politics at every level of American politics over the long-term, the denunciation of beyondism or cross-party politics and alliances is utterly wrong, even disastrous. In historical terms, it concedes a distinctly modern political taxonomy a pride of place it should never have in Christian thinking about politics. It also ignores the fact that nearly every major moral reform movement that has peacefully created a new consensus on a fundamental issue must draw significant support from different major political parties, and above all from a truly diverse coalition drawn from the nation itself. Furthermore, for any Christian movement, on behalf of any Christian cause, to tell a single political party in advance that it will have one’s support, no matter what, is to tell that party that it need not concern itself with that movement’s cause except in token, symbolic ways. To be content with that situation is a serious error.
It will not escape any attentive observer that— with a record now stretching over several decades—the two party-bound Christian political strategies have accumulated only modest political achievements on their own terms. On the Christian “Right” the pro-life movement has an unimpressive judicial and legislative record (the partial ban on embryonic stem-cell research is one admirable exception). Over thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, several of the pro-abortion justices on the Supreme Court in the last several decades were appointed by putatively pro-life Republican presidents, and the more recent appointments’ commitment to pro-life positions is uncertain. Furthermore, there is no particular incentive for the Republican party to give much more than intermittent rhetorical support to pro-life causes. Republican Presidents quite literally phone in their support to the annual pro-life rally in Washington D.C., and offers a few applause lines for sympathetic audiences. If the Republican party had failed so singularly to enact or simply to work for and publicize the agenda of financial conservatives or foreign-policy conservatives, they would have mutinied decades ago, taking their support for Republican campaigns with them.
In dishearteningly similar ways, the Christian “Left” has watched as the Democratic Party gives decidedly feeble support or even stands in outright opposition to campaigns to end our newfound embrace of torture, or further preëmptive war, or to help the poor in America and abroad. As the Christian “Left” continues to support the Democratic party, poverty has increased, income inequality have exploded, America now has the largest prison population of any country in the world, and torture has entered the respectable mainstream of political debate, with few meaningful objections by Democrats. The Democratic party has too often straightened its spine to offer unwavering support for abortion and to offer a quasi-positivist account of how largely unregulated scientific research on human embryos will change our lives, but not to help the poor or the vulnerable— not coincidentally, standing tall on the issues that often matter most to its wealthy campaign donors.
Given this history, the failures of the “Christians need to choose a party and be tough enough to pay the price of party politics” strategy are now clear. While individual Christians continue to work in innumerable pro-life and anti-poverty ministries throughout the country and help others in countless ways, as political movements both the Christian “Left” and the Christian “Right” have conspicuously remained among the less successful reform movements in modern American history.
To start, it should be said right away that there is something very odd about the strange contemporary fealty to secular political demarcations among Christians. The very notions of “Right” and “Left” were created in the most violent phase of the French Revolution, where those terms designated factions within the National Convention. Left and Right as political labels were thus born at the precise moment where politics became the supposed source and apex of transcendent desire, expressly replacing God with obsessive attachment to political ideology and the idolatry of the nation-state. It was also the moment where modern secularism first violently attacked Christians and Christianity. It was the Convention that initiated the infamous Dechristianization campaign, which included a “Left” that counted among its accomplishments the desecration of countless Churches and the collective execution of cloistered nuns. The “White” (i.e., antirevolutionary) Terror that followed was hardly a testament to the moral rectitude of the modern “Right.” Christians should at least be aware of the provenance of these labels before identifying themselves so intensely with them.
Even if one is tempted to write off a discussion of this ominous history as an instance of the genetic fallacy— the blood of Christians being merely an accidental effect attending the emergence of the central descriptive division in modern secular politics— there remains the nettlesome truth about successful moral reform movements in modern democracies. The pro-life movement and Christians most concerned about poverty compare their causes to the causes of ending slavery and segregation. Yet those examples should be studied with care.
The British slave trade was ended in large part through the heroic efforts of William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament strongly allied with the Tory Party, but who relied for a very large portion of support for abolition from his Whig opponents. Above all, Wilberforce appealed constantly and with great success to the British nation as a whole, regardless of party, to end the slave trade, with millions signing petitions and attending meetings to learn about the organized mass kidnapping, murder and debasement at its core.
In the same way, into the twentieth century, civil rights for African-Americans was for sometime an ancillary policy priority for a minority, safely contained within the Republican party, before slowly becoming an important Democratic cause. Beyond party designation, however, led by Martin Luther King the civil rights movement appealed to Americans as such to end the horrors of segregation, and Americans as such began to respond. The Civil Rights Act ended segregation in large part through the extraordinary legislative energy of the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who famously realized that large numbers of whites would abandon the New Deal coalition as a result. But this accomplishment was only possible because—as Johnson well understood— large majorities of Republicans in both the House and Senate supported civil rights, compensating for numerous Southern Democratic defections, and these Republicans were in turn supported by their constituents.
Yet what does this history mean? It would be easy to respond that the pro-life movement in the Democratic Party is small– where then, should pro-lifers turn for cross-party support? And if ending torture and attention to the poor is a priority, isn’t electing Democrats the most likely and direct route to that goal? In a country with only two major political parties, doesn’t one have to choose?
It is, of course, easy to counsel continuing with the present course. Amorphous, sometimes sentimental calls to “solidarity” often appear among pundits of the Christian “Left” in this context, just as gestural, not always rigorous appeals to “Aristotelian phronesis” usually find their way into similar arguments among pundits of the Christian “Right.” In more substantive terms, some may argue that pro-life voters are Republicans for many reasons of which abortion is only one, and those who are most serious about poverty or torture are Democrats for many reasons of which these questions of justice are only one, and thus the current configuration is a “natural” one.
One wonders, however, if a “natural” political division among Christians that produces such meager results for what are said to be the most urgent issues on each side should not be subject to more vigorous criticism and opened to something new. And even if our current divisions seem natural to us, does several decades of political marginality for advocates of life— with no end in sight— justify perpetuating the status quo?
It must be said that this emphasis on choosing a party, accepting its priorities, and sticking with it no matter what ignores the fact that in the last several decades of American politics, both parties have for far too long paid vague and ineffective lip service to different basic Christian principles about human life and dignity, while each has very often devoted their real and politically effective energies to various kinds of violence placed conveniently out of view of most American voters: violence against the unborn, against prisoners, against the sick and the weak and the vulnerable. Ramesh Pomuru has inspired a number of recent reflections about a “Party of Death” that while not a literal party, has worked its way through American politics and culture with pernicious consequences. To make their agenda effective, Christians must begin to think less of contemporary America’s secular versions of Left and Right and begin to build a corresponding Party of Life within and across party lines. By distributing their money, votes and time more carefully, and above all by being much more assertive about the profound and consistent reasons for their unpredictability in secular political terms, Christians can change the stalemate that afflicts pro-life politics.
A glance at practical realities shows that campaign funds are a prerequisite for electoral success. Pro-life organizations are consistently outspent by their pro-abortion counterparts in elections by wide margins, and groups opposing torture are not especially well-funded either. It would change America’s electoral math a great deal if Christians committed themselves to much more consistent and generous support for pro-life organizations that dedicated their efforts to supporting active and committed pro-life candidates. There are of course a good number of Republicans who support pro-life policies above all on abortion, and on issues like torture as well, and they deserve respect and often support, even from those who might not otherwise agree with their positions on other issues. In this way, as the Reagan Coalition has begun to fray, the internal debate within the GOP about the core principles of the party offers several opportunities for Christians within the party to emphasize the preeminence of life in Republican politics.
Other Republican candidates content themselves with passing, lifeless rhetoric on all life issues, or simply actively oppose pro-life causes. Those who simply do not support the pro-life movement at all should no longer be supported on the grounds of “responsible” party loyalty, any more than pro-abortion, pro-torture Democrats should be.
It’s also most important to remember that, depending on the survey, no less than a quarter and in some polls, around forty percent of registered Democrats are sympathetic to pro-life politics. Even accepting the most conservative estimates, there are literally millions of Democratic pro-life votes— but it is no exaggeration to say that they have been deliberately deprived of a voice. In recent years, however, an organization has been created to give them one (its name is Democrats For Life– and it is worth noting that it does not work for, fund or endorse Democratic candidates at any level who are not pro-life). This circumstantial constellation, featuring a mixed and often tepid commitment to pro-life policies among Republicans, and a Democratic group that will give financial support only to pro-life candidates, offers real possibilities on both sides of our political divide.
If pro-life groups in both parties received substantial support for committed pro-life candidates, GOP candidates would be required, out of electoral self-interest if nothing else, to offer more visible and active support for pro-life politics to win that money and those votes. On the other side of the aisle, if the small numbers of pro-life democratic congressman and senators could grow in some clearly perceptible way— say up to 50 or 60 pro-life Democratic congressman from a little over 30 today, and up to 10 or 15 pro-life Democratic senators from 3 or 4 today— that would make it simply impossible to use lazy, dishonest but effective attacks to marginalize pro-lifers as “right wing ideologues.” In the same way, opposition to America’s becoming a torture state de jure would benefit enormously from the support of a significant bloc of Republican pro-life legislators who hardly lend themselves to being described as “soft” or bleeding hearts. Economic conservatives are often given to praise the salutary effects of competition and emphasize the need for groups of stakeholders to insist upon direct and measurable results for an enterprise. Pro-life politics can learn something from them on these questions. Furthermore, by more widely and consistently building pro-life support, there would be a motivated base of support for pro-life positions across the nation with significant support at different points along the political spectrum, just as there was for the abolition of the slave trade and for civil rights.
Yet these tactical questions are only a small part of the answer to building a Party of Life. The supreme question is one of principle.
It is worth returning for a moment to think about earlier moral reform movements in modern democracies. Wilberforce and King, for all their virtues, had obvious flaws. But they accomplished so much in large part because they it was overwhelmingly clear to their contemporaries that they did not trim and spin their ultimate convictions for the transitory imperatives of party advantage. It is certainly not the case that they never compromised, or never took a gradual path to their goals: but the goals themselves were clear, and they were in no way submitted to the approval of party interests. They and many others allied with them insisted on supporting the good wherever it was found, and their moral authority was exponentially stronger for it.
In this way, Wilberforce urged his nation to takes its Christianity far more seriously and rigorously than it had been doing, strongly supported more humanitarian policies in Britain’s colonies, favored peace whenever it could be had, and in various ways embraced causes that regularly confounded the conventional political categories of his time on Christian grounds, because he was a Christian. He was willing to vote against his party on a many important issues when principle was at stake (repeatedly infuriating his Tory friend and ally Pitt the Younger).
Martin Luther King’s work was premised on non-violence, a non-violence that expressed itself at home and abroad beyond civil rights and led him to criticize with great vigor the same President that had worked so hard to pass civil rights legislation and also to denounce and distance himself from the turn to violent protest in the sixties— so much so that in those radical years, he was increasingly written off as a tool of established power. Yet throughout, King’s political action was founded upon Christian convictions that transcended the immediate demands of a political party.
Christian truths about human life and dignity today are in need of people who do the same. For too long, the Christian “Left” has spoken clearly about the poor when it has been unfashionable to do so, as well as about the iniquities of capital punishment and the unjustly imprisoned with reference to a seamless garment— yet they have conveniently downplayed or even ignored the garment’s protection of the unborn, and too often only uttered lame, shoe-shuffling rhetoric along the lines of “having a conversation about difficult choices” before moving back to proposing programs to support the disadvantaged. The Christian “Right” has spoken with far greater moral clarity and honesty about abortion, but (given Church teaching, remarkably including Catholics) have been largely silent or indifferent to poverty and at times bizarrely sanguine about legalized torture, while devoting considerable space in Christian journals and websites to issues with nowhere near the same moral urgency, like urging their readers to assume a still more thoroughgoing skepticism about global warming.
Christians can and naturally will have very different views on various political proposals on all sorts of issues, from global warming to economic policy to education; and while Christians are bound to concern themselves with the plight of the poor, the relative role of the free market and government action in ameliorating their situation can of course be understood in diverse ways.
Yet on fundamental issues of life— including and above all abortion, torture, capital punishment, and for all the various debates about methods that may legitimately be raised, concentrated attention to the situation of the desperately poor here and abroad— there can and should be far more unity among Christians than there has been for decades. For being divided against themselves, it is now obvious from decades of political experience that Christians have gotten neither the life agenda of the Christian “Left” nor of the Christian “Right.” The consequences of Christians’ party-driven silences and non-sequiturs are now clear: they make it simplicity itself to accuse Christians working for Christian causes of being predictable partisans— at once inconsistent, expediently selective, and completely indistinguishable from their secular political allies. These accusations are of course most frequently and vehemently made by fellow Christians allied with the opposing political party, and many Christians have for several decades worked very effectively to mutually diminish one another’s persuasive power and moral credibility.
It must also be said that the political choices that America has made over the last few decades simply give no credence to the notion that by working primarily within party coalitions, Christians have helped educate Americans as a whole about the moral imperatives attending their preeminent issues: the fight against poverty or abortion, or the importance of ending legalized torture or ending nascent eugenics. Rather, as Christians continue to accuse one another of being partisan apologists, America has gotten abortion and increasing poverty alike, legalized torture and nascent eugenics alike. In political terms, the effective convergence of anti-life policies from the Left and the Right continues, and as long as this convergence prospers with little effective protest from deeply divided Christians, Christians will continue to be considered— as more than one prominent political operative has been known to describe them in different ways— as the useful idiots and chumps of American politics.
The evils we face are no less real than those of the past. To earn the respect and thus above all to win the victories that the movements of Wilberforce and King earned, the Party of Life must work both within and across secular parties, in surprising yet strikingly consistent ways. The Party of Life must vigorously oppose abortion and torture alike, denounce their respective supporters’ uncannily congruent deployment of pseudo-scientific and gratuitously technical euphemisms, a compulsion that betrays the fact that even their defenders know implicitly that these acts are evil. The Party of Life must peacefully but vigorously call to account a culture that teeters on the edge of outright eugenics while the ranks of its poor increase and its prisons overflow.
If it is “beyondism” to support a fight against these evils— and to state clearly how they are related to one another, even if it makes down-the-line partisans of both political parties uncomfortable— than this is a condition that many, many Christians should happily and vocally acknowledge as their own. When Christians stop waiting behind party lines and step forward to speak and act boldly according to the logic of their faith and not to the shifting exigencies of transient political parties, then they will be heard anew. With God’s help, they will end a long and fruitless impasse and win victories for life.
