An Important Lesson For The American Left From An Evangelical Pastor

Someone recommended the podcast The Bible For Normal People to me, perhaps they thought I could achieve normalcy,  perhaps they thought I'd just find it interesting.  The second one happened.  I've just started listening to it, the first is the hosts talking with the different sort of evangelical ex-preacher Rob Bell who is infamous among conservative evangelicals as someone who went from founding and building an evangelical church with amazing speed to having thought about what  The Bible really says and quickly leaving a lot of that behind.  I'll let you listen yourself if you want to, I'm going to focus on one small thing he said in passing.

He said that Jesus and the early Jesus movement, what turned into Christianity, confronted an extremely powerful official narrative about Roman domination and Roman power and the centralized authority of Rome, the Pax Romana, the Roman order, a kind of imperial order that was so habitual at the time that anything that didn't go along with it must have seemed like insanity.  A little like how secular lefties are so stuck in their 1950s-60s rut only instead of the flop that secular leftist orthodoxy is,  it was the dominant narrative which almost all people probably used to lead their lives.  We, of course, confront something similar in the dominant corporatist, Mammonist United States, the habit of thought most people are caught up in to one extent or another,  what any American left will have to present an alternative to.

Rob Bell pointed out that if you're going to go against such an ingrained and powerful narrative, you had better present a more convincing and more appealing narrative or you're not going to have any chance of changing peoples' minds into adopting your way of thinking.  That, I have come to be convinced over the past fifteen years or so, is one of the major reasons that the secular left in the United States and elsewhere have failed to either gain or hold success in politics or in society because their counter narrative is a reversion to the kind of deterministic fatalism that was part of the dominant pagan narrative which Christianity overcame.

In one of his lectures I posted a long time ago David Bentley Hart noted that one of the pagan critiques of Christians was what they took as their giddily positive view of life based in the promise of salvation and eternal happiness and even the idea that life on Earth could be better than it was, that people were not destined to live out whatever fate the gods or, in the case of the early atheists, chance had cast as their lot.  Especially the intellectual pagans were in love with that gloomy view of life, no doubt they thought it manly and adult.  A similar critique of Christianity is certainly contained in the contemporary propaganda of atheism and secularism, it is certainly contained in materialism.

Even if the prospective convert to the secular left doesn't confront that ultimate downer of atheist-materialist-secularism, even if they aren't let in on the secret that materialists view them as objects with no transcendent significance or reason for living, on a political level the loud and frequent assertions of the Marxists who told Americans who got cheated of their wages and were discriminated against that the good news was that Soviet or, later, Maoist or even Cuban communism was their good news.   As I've pointed out before, even the hard core American Stalinists didn't believe that, even as they preached it, since just about none of them gave up life in the1930s-50s American hell hole for life under their hero.

I came to realize from an accelerated program of reading and listening to and considering what the secular left says and offers made possible by the internet that secularism is a total flop and there was never any rational reason for any rational person to ever believe it would ever be anything but a flop.

In the United States the greatest success of leftist politics was in first the Abolitionist and then the Civil Rights movements and both of those, in the 19th and early 20th centuries were mostly a manifestation of religious, of overtly Christian activism.  The same can be said of the movement for Women's Suffrage which, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a few others, aside, was almost entirely dominated by an overtly Christian membership.

That may make even some nice non-Christian lefties unhappy to have that pointed out but that is the history of it.   It was in the 1960s as that Christian activism started to be swamped by the largely college and university based "new left" which was overtly non-religious and overtly anti-Christian that things began to go bad for the left.   They continue to be bad.   Of the people I knew in the "new left" or who were active at that time, I can tell you that those who worked from religious organizations were far more likely to keep it up and far more likely to persist and convince other people than the anti-religious people were, though the anti-religious people were better at one thing,  grabbing the mic.   I think a lot of that was that the media, never all that unfriendly to the established economic and political order, disappeared the religious left because they knew the secular left would more likely turn into the useful tool of the established order by alienating people through their crappy alternative.

Just a comment on what Rob Bell said.   I might have my disagreements with him, I don't know that much about him, but he got that right.  And it shouldn't be forgotten that he was the one who built a megachurch from the ground up in a few years.  The guy understands messaging has to be based on offering people the possibility of something better.  Why should they welcome the dismal, deterministic and nasty view of secularism as articulated by atheists and anti-Christians?