There’s Danger to Your Right, Not Just Your Left

... we live in strange days, to quote the title of a recent book by a Christian leader in Australia, Mark Sayers. Slippery slopes go both ways. Our generation of pastors, equipped with guardrails to protect us from veering to the left, will also need to learn how to keep church members resistant from insidious ideologies that accompany the reaction of people on the populist right.

Sayers sees two groups, small in number but loud in influence. The New Left impulse was once transgressive—an insurgent force that attacked the morality of the establishment. Now that the New Left has attained cultural power, the movement has followed Herbert Marcuse’s trajectory toward authoritarianism, and, not surprisingly, the heart of this perspective is sexual freedom and self-determined identity. Dignity requires separation from anyone who might question your identity or choices.

Sayers sees the impulse at the heart of the New Left as essentially religious:

“The religious leaders of the left set up their inner courts, where only those circumcised of moral absolutism may enter. If anyone decries sexual expression or reproductive rights, or claims absolute truth, he is a Samaritan, unclean and unwelcome in the courts of the holy. . . . The New Left moral order increasingly begins to stiffen with a rigid and puritanical narrowness, becomes the establishment, trying to enforce its moral code from the commanding cultural heights.” (94)

Conservative Christians are well aware of this threat, trained for decades to spot and reject the assumptions that lead to the left’s vision for society.

But what happens when a new version of the right emerges to fight back, “reanimated and reimagined with a transgressive, cool sheen”? In seeking to reject identity politics on the left, some today have embraced dogmas and a nationalist agenda on the right, which morphs into its own brand of identity politics. Patriotic fervor and the rejection of globalization can devolve into nationalism and populist racism.

Ross Douthat believes the rise of both the New Left and the alt-right are the first signs of truly post-Christian politics. Without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right will be “tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed,” he writes. We are entering a world in which Christian virtue does not shade our political alliances, on either far right or the far left. In Sayers’s description, it’s “a world without forgiveness, which seeks not compromise but the utter humiliation of one’s cultural and political enemies.” Read More