A Brief History of the Christian Left (Re-release)
This is the first episode in a 2019 series on the Religious Left . Brad and Dan begin by giving a brief history of the Christian Left over the last century. They highlight four main differences with evangelicalism: approaches to the Bible, the relationship between science and religion, the end of the world, and the Social Gospel vs. Individual Piety.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White, Mirren, and Jesus. and Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I'm currently sitting under like a foot of snow up here in the Northeast, and I'm pleased to be joined by my co-host as always.
I am Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Today, we're going to talk about the history of the religious left.
We have outlined the history of the religious right.
We've gone into detail about that on this podcast.
And we've had many people ask about, so what's the history of the religious left?
How come I don't know that much about it?
Why don't I hear about it as much as I do the religious right?
And on top of all that, if you are paying attention to the 2020 Democratic primaries, you are hearing a lot of talk about religion.
Mayor Pete, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, all of these folks are talking about their faith.
And so Dan and I decided it's time that we launch a series on the religious left.
I do want to say that we're going to talk about what is the religious left and Christianity.
The religious left is very diverse.
And so by no means today can we sort of get into what progressive faith might mean for various Jewish communities, various Muslim communities, various Hindu communities.
I mean, there's so many.
I mean, there are dozens of podcasts, episodes to do on what might be called the religious left.
Today we want to talk about what is known as the sort of religious left as it relates to Christianity.
So does that sound good Dan?
I mean did I miss anything there and kind of setting all that up?
I don't think you did.
We're going to spend I think probably a number of episodes on this kind of laying out more of a Kind of a historical background a little bit today.
We'll get into, um, we'll bring it in today, but we'll get into more detail as we go along.
Discussions about like, where the hell is the religious left?
People will hear you use that phrase and they'll be like, the what?
So I think it sounds good.
And you were, you're going to start us off.
We were talking and you have this kind of exercise that you sort of said you've done with your students.
And I've done similar things.
I think it's a really, really telling exercise.
I mean, why don't we start with that?
Because it kind of illustrates the point that we're after in this episode.
I began my teaching career in the South, in Tennessee and Virginia.
And I would often begin my class on Christianity and modern culture by asking students to name famous American Christians.
And I would say, you know, like people that are living today.
Right.
So back a couple of years, it was like George W. Bush.
Tim Tebow.
When I ask now, sometimes people say things like Justin Bieber, you know, like Justin Bieber's going to Hillsong Church.
I mean, really recently you could talk about like Chris Pratt or some others who've been baptized and talk about their Christianity and all this stuff.
What's telling to me about that is I would say, you're right, these are famous Christians, no doubt about it.
And then I would have a slide on the PowerPoint and I would go and I would show people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Martin Luther King Jr.
I'd get a lot of scrunched faces like, what?
Like, these aren't Christian people or these aren't famous Christians.
Or most tellingly, they would say these aren't people famous for their Christianity.
And one of the things I would say is, well, you know, that that may be true in terms of being famous for their Christianity, but these are certainly Christian people.
They go to Christian church on Sundays.
Hillary Clinton talks about being a Methodist all the time.
Martin Luther King Jr.
was a minister.
Um, these are people who went to bed at night thinking of themselves like very clearly as Christian people.
And so they would say, well, they're not real Christians, right?
I mean, they're not like the real, like tried and true Christians.
And I'd say, no, actually they are.
However, what you're expressing is the fact that the religious right that evangelicals have gained such a monopoly on the brand.
Christianity in this country that oftentimes we either pass over the faith of someone like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, or we say, well, yeah, they may go to church, but they're not really a Christian.
Does that make sense, Dan?
Yeah.
And it's interesting.
It's sort of like, I think what it illustrates is the progressive Christians or non-evangelical Christians, you could say that they've sort of lost the branding war, right?
We talked a lot recently about how white evangelical Christianity is a kind of subculture, and we've talked in the past about how most white evangelical Christians—and I was this way, I think you were this way—if they define themselves, they don't define themselves as white evangelical Christians, they just say, I'm Christian.
Like, for them, that's what Christianity is.
And I think that kind of makes sense.
We've talked about subcultural identity and how it's cohesive and all of that.
What's really striking about it is that I think they've been so successful at that, that it has traveled outside of evangelicalism.
And what you see in your students and what I see in people is, when they hear Christian, that's what a Christian is.
And I think, and I'd love to hear if you think this is right or not, but certainly when I was in the evangelical world, Or people outside of it.
I have a hunch that, this is anecdotal, but I'm really, I'd put money on it, that if you ask people, like, to name what Christians are, there's only two main groups that come to mind.
One is Catholics, or at least some caricature of what Catholics are, and the other one is evangelical Protestants.
Maybe a third with, like, a kind of quasi-Pentecostal black church or something like that.
But that's it.
The notion of this kind of whole world of what we would call mainline or progressive Christian churches, never mind all the other religious groups that you sort of talked about.
I think that's just largely invisible.
And that's that is this kind of branding failure, so to speak, of progressive Christianity.
It's just it's almost culturally invisible, I think, to most people and certainly to most outsiders.
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