Why I distrust the idea of a "religious left"

So for anyone who hasn't yet figured this out, I am an Orthodox Christian who lives and writes from a socially liberal perspective. One of the first people to stumble across this blog, Alana at morningcoffee, pegged me as a "Sojourner Magazine" type, by which I suppose she meant a lefty in the nicest possible way. The fact is, however, that although I have read an issue or two of Sojourner Magazine, and have even gone to hear Jim Wallis speak, I am profoundly uneasy about the whole emerging "Christian Left" movement with which Sojourners has recently become associated.

I suppose my reservations go, at least in part, to the track record of the religious right in this regard. The religious right, in my view, has been cynically commodified by the pro-business, big corporate lobby. People of deep faith, many from lower income brackets, are having their genuine religious impulses exploited for the gain of others who care little for their values. They are being encouraged to vote against their own economic interests by politicians who talk blithely about "morality," "the family," and the "sanctity of life," as if they were really concerned about these issues (although anyone who looks at their way of life would quickly conclude otherwise). The reality is that their true consituents are the ones who get invited to the gala banquets and white tie fund-raisers: the rich, big business moguls. This harnessing of religion to political expediency is an incredibly ugly thing, and I don't think it gets any prettier if it is done by people on the left.

And yet there is another, deeper reason that I am wary of this "Christian Left" rhetoric: I think it has a profound tendency to degenerate into a kind of "liberal chic." It is far too easy to become a "Rolex liberal," to set oneself up as an "outsider," while still reaping all the benefits of being on the inside. We can be quite well off financially, have nice homes and nice cars, take far more than our share of the world's resources, all the while protesting that we support fair trade, that we opposed the war in Iraq, that we really are good people after all. Isn't that great? We get all the benefits of an oppressive structure, all the bonuses of the three Ws (wealthy, white, western) with none of the guilt! We can have our cake and eat it too! As for those others, well, let them eat cake too!

Just not our cake.

In this abusive system of relationships of which we are a part, no one can claim to be an outsider, no one can claim to be innocent. We are all responsible, every last one of us. Maybe we don't own the sweatshops, maybe we didn't exploit the workers ourselves, but we were all too happy to take advantage of the bargain prices while ignoring the surcharge of human misery. Maybe we didn't drop the bombs or pull the triggers, but we paid others, kids from poor Southern ghettos and bankrupt Midwestern farms, to do it for us.

"Oh," some part of me says, "but I am a pacifist. I opposed the war." Did I tear my clothes into pieces and run naked and screaming through the streets crying "Stop it! Stop it!" like the prophet Jeremiah? Did I do anything at all?

No. I shook my head and clucked my tongue, and turned to the comics.

Dr. Paul Farmer, an MD working in Haiti who speaks to issues of global inequity from a liberation theology perspective, once said that the problem with "WLs" ("White Liberals") is that we believe that we can have it all, that we can create a better world without giving up the privileges to which we have become accustomed. We don't understand that there is a place for sacrifice, and even for shame.

I was reflecting this morning on the fact that, in the Psalms, shame is part of the cycle of violence: first we defeat our enemies and "cover them with shame," then they rout us and put us to shame, so we pray that God will give us strength to put them to shame again, and on and on it goes. Shame waters the seeds of violence that lie dormant within us. But is there a place for shame in creating a more compassionate structure of relationships? Put in another way, have we become so shameless, so utterly brazen, that we can "take almost everything, and then come back for the rest," as one Ani DiFranco song puts it, while still believing ourselves to be liberal, progressive, and perhaps even morally superior?