Ask Auntie Pinko
April 4, 2002

Dear Auntie Pinko,

Please explain to me how the "Right" has taken Christians from the "Left".

Wasn't Jesus the guy that helped the poor and the downtrodden? Wasn't he the guy who said - be as nice to people as you want to treated by them? And wasn't he the guy who was really down on greedy rich folks?

Is this smoke and mirrors or what? These Christian folks need to be in our camp.

Brad Franklinton,
LA

Dear Brad,

Let me assure you that there are plenty of us Christians here on the Left. Many of us for precisely the reasons you've so perceptively identified in your analysis of the teachings of Jesus.

But Brad, as the Gnostics learned in the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Christian Era, and the Arians learned at the Council of Nicaea, and the Cathars, Manichaeans and Albigensians learned in the Middle Ages, and the whole of Europe learned during the Protestant Reformation, there are Christians and there are Christians. Some of us lean more heavily on the idea of Christianity as a personal transformation of ourselves based on the life of Christ, and some seem to prefer a faith based on the transformation of everyone to a rigid doctrinal standard.

And there, I think, we have the essence of why some Christians embrace left-wing political convictions, and some adhere to the right wing. Left-wing Christians tend to be those who took the parable of the Pharisee and the publican very seriously. "Which of these men do you think went away justified before God?" Jesus asked. The Pharisee who strode to the front of the Temple and extolled his own orthodoxy with loud self-congratulation and snide digs at the "less worthy?" Or the publican who humbled himself at the back of the Temple saying, "Lord, be merciful to me, I am a sinner?"

The average left-wing Christian is not the type to invite their employees to "voluntary" prayer meetings in the work place. The average left-wing Christian is not the type to assert loudly that of which God does, or does not, "approve". (In fact, the left-wing Christians of Auntie Pinko's acquaintance are appalled at the very idea of anyone presuming to speak "for" God, to identify "who God loves," or, even more distressing, who God "hates!")

As a friend of Auntie Pinko's put it so wittily in an article on the history of Christianity, there have always been two kinds of Christians: The burn-ERS, and the burn-EES. While that's an overgeneralization (and imprecise, at that, as the former group have not always relied solely on fire - they have no prejudice against the sword or the rope, either,) as with most generalizations, there is some experience at the core. I would put it, rather, that there are two types of Christians - those who believe the faith is worth killing for, and those who believe it is worth dying for.

I'm not at all sure, really, that we want to attract any more of the former group to the left wing. Perhaps we should just be grateful for the quiet presence among us of the Christians we already have, and leave it to the conscience of the rest to find their own way to the political ideology that suits them best.

Thanks for writing to Auntie Pinko!

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