Phil Christman, ‘Why Christians Should Be Leftists’ (2025)

'Revolution? Nein.'

Christman (whose surname autocorrect stubbornly kept trying to correct to ‘Christmas’ when I was drafting this) is a Leftist, as am I, and his views and mine, politically speaking, have many commonalities. This means that, although I am not, as he is, a Christian, I am naturally sympathetic to his argument that Christianity as praxis, as a being-in-the-world, as ethos and guide to living, is Leftist. My bias, though, should give me pause. Many Christians, especially in evangelical communities in the USA, are not Leftists: are, on the contrary, soft right, or hard right, or in many cases wholeheartedly in the bag for Trump, his irreligion, lying, sexual incontinence, braggadocio, pride, bullying and hate-thy-neighbour-ness notwithstanding. We cannot say—and to be fair to him, Christmas does not suggest—that this is mere hypocrisy on their behalf, although plenty on the Left think such an accusation is the heighth and breadth of political engagement with the right: ‘Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven, yet I see you have a 401(k) savings plan CHECKMATE, FASCIST’ and so on. That ‘right-wing Christianity’ is a rats-nest of manifest self-contradiction, insincerity and selfishness is, whatever the atheist left like to say, not true.

It is, I suppose, not to people like me that Christman is addressing this book. In one of his many footnotes he tacitly concedes this: ‘but however it happened,’ he says, of the change of political orientation many have undergone, with MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the COVID lockdown, Trumpism and others, ‘you’re here: you’re still a Christian.’ Then the pendant footnote: ‘I ask a moment of forbearance from those readers who do not identify as Christian. I’m glad you’re here, too.’

I’ll take him at his word: I was myself glad to be there, and very much enjoyed reading Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Christman has been called the best essayist working in America today, and his great skill is on display here: he’s readable, eloquent, witty, engaging, thought-provoking, and manages to be openly polemical without being hectoring, or bullying. He writes with tremendous charm and his is a warm open, loving heart—soul, he might say. This is a heartfelt, energising book.

The book opens with some touchingly-handled personal recollections. Christman describes the younger him, growing up in an evangelical community that, insofar as it acknowledged ideology, skewed rightward. He was an often unhappy individual, someone who did not seem to hear God in the way others seemed to, fearful that God didn’t love him, even that he was damned. ‘These fears were sharpened by the Calvinist theological orientation of my family and my home church: theoretically, in that system, there is nothing preventing God from creating a person just for the purpose of rejecting and damning that person, to God’s own ill-understood greater glory. Paul raises this possibility in Romans 9.’ He ascribes much of this to the lack of support for his neurodiversity and autism-spectrum-ness, or even back then the understanding that such a thing existed. He is now less anxious about all that, and describes the kind of small-scale Road to Tarsus he experienced:

Ultimately, I came to know God in a somewhat more roundabout way, and that—even more than the various political points I’m going to try to make—is the real subject of this book. Early in college—I attended a Christian college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, now called Calvin University—I met up one afternoon with some other students to read through the Sermon on the Mount together: … It will surprise nobody that a young man as insecure about God’s love as I was could also feel a certain sneaking insecurity about where he stood in the eyes of other people—particularly, in my case, because I am a straight man, in the eyes of young women. During the period in question, I was nursing a particular heartbreak, feeling the kind of nightmarish, hormone-intensified loneliness that young people are prone to. And I remember sitting there, at one of those little outdoor picnic tables near the dorms, where people gathered to play the guitar, smoke, flirt, or pray—at Calvin it was always one of those four, or all four at once—and thinking, I am reading the Bible in the middle of the afternoon with a bunch of strangers. That’s not something a guy who has a girlfriend does. Am I a loser? I think I’m a loser. Then I took a look at the people around me and thought: Yep. I am a loser. We are the losers. This is what a table of ungirlfriended losers looks like. I knew that these thoughts were mean and unkind, but I had them anyway; because I judged myself, I judged the people around me. Mentally and emotionally, I lived in a savage economy of winners and losers, and I spent a lot of time feeling like the latter.

And then, as we read the Sermon—popcorn-style, like the good little Christian students we were, one person taking over from the last—something shifted. I won’t say that these other people were suddenly transfigured in my mind, that I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces. But a fundamentally other way of thinking about them suddenly appeared to me as an option; a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which—this is as close as I can get to summarizing it—each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared.

This is powerful: a sudden understanding of the universe as grounded in ‘universal, constant, and unvarying love’, and the Sermon on the Mount is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible. It plays a large part in Why Christians Should Be Leftists.

I agree with Christman that one of Trump’s most despicable and malign attributes is his addiction to a narrative of winners and losers, ‘winning’ being the paramount thing in life, ‘loser’ being the worst, most scornful term in his lexicon. I agree with him too that Capitalism, or Neoliberalism, has grown into a state of neo-feudalism, in which a few ‘winners’ take all the money and own everything and most of us are ‘losers’. The focus on the ‘winners’, the valorisation of wealth and material success, the scorn and dismissal of the poor, the sick, the weak, the losers: this is radically incompatible with Christianity. In this Christman is wholly right.

Still, it is true that Christman does not entirely, as the phrase goes, steelman the right-wing Christianity he critiques.