In 1998, Patricia Ireland, President of the National Organization
for Women, refused to condemn the openly misogynous behavior of the sitting
President of the United States. Though the whole world recognized his behavior
as exceedingly reductionist and inappropriate toward women, the organization
that claimed moral superiority in the alleged cultural battle against such acts
was strangely silent. It was no secret, politically, why this was the case: NOW
was not nearly as interested in the fate of women such as Monica Lewinsky as it
was the future of abortion—an issue with which Clinton agreed with them. From
that day to this, no student of political discourse has taken their mission
statement seriously. NOW lost its credibility during the brouhaha, and has
never won it back. The whole world knows that “feminism” is a myth now, and
that only certain types of “feminists” are welcome in the tent. No longer a
voice crying in the wilderness for justice, the militant feminist movement is
now just more noise in an already-cacophonous environment.
A similar destiny awaits that most precious of creatures in our
current discourse—the Christian Lefty. Perhaps too many Christians spend an inordinate
amount of time at work, or with their families, or in their house of worship,
or otherwise trying to live out the gospel in a hostile world. These Christians
simply don’t have the time or the inclination to hang around graduate sociology
departments, or “forward-thinking” seminaries. Because this is the natural
habitat of the Christian Lefty, most Christians simply won’t run across too
many examples of her—except on Facebook and Twitter, where she has recently
developed quite the loud voice in pursuit of “justice.” The Christian Lefty
fancies herself a postmodern Voice in the Wilderness—a prophetic song being
sung against the discordant strains of demagoguery, nativism, sexism,
xenophobia, and racism. But in reality, she is the prejudicial demagogue—the
injustice that rolls inexorably over the skulls of the faithful. She doesn’t
know it yet, but this is how history will adjudicate her use of her “voice.”
There are several reasons why.
First, she enjoys the most docetic of existences. She spends her
days cossetted with other academics who do not rub daily elbows with the
faithful. She can Tweet with abandon from her climate-controlled office while
never having to pay a home visit to a couple from the church who can’t pay
their rent or keep their heat on for the winter. She stands in front of the
class, lecturing the next generation of ministers about “the poor” without ever
having come into contact with any actual poor in her own church family. She
lives out her faith in a bubble that is completely friendly to her
counter-intuitive babblings, and because of the nature of social media never
has to reconcile her worldview with reality. She is a spirit divorced from the
Body, and she must be lauded in spirit and in truth. This existence is
meaningful to her fellow academics, and is useful to the godless socialists in
the media who exploit her “voice” to drive a wedge in the American confessing
churches—but outside the walls of this Lefty Reich, she is no Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer had, at least, a body to give for the cause of confessional
integrity; she would have to descend from her Olympian heights and engage the
rabble she so flippantly spurns in order to be an enfleshed participant in the
current conflict. Until then, she only seems to exist. Her thoughts flit out
like nerve pains, sharp and focused, then dissipating into a dull torpor,
awaiting the next moment a synapse misfires.
Second, her silence for the past eight years serves as a mitigating
muffler on her current credibility. Where was her plaintive wail when President
Obama’s Justice Department walked automatic weapons across the border of Mexico
and ensured that they would end up in the hands of drug cartels? She seems
overly interested in détente with Mexico now; how many Mexican innocents might
reasonably wonder where her sympathies lay in 2010 when that same Justice
Department claimed “executive privilege” in open court rather than tell the
truth about the scandal? What she loathed in Nixon she tolerated in Obama. And
where was her Voice in the Wilderness when President Obama violated the rules
of the Senate to shove the ACA through committee by making easily breakable
promises—and having the legislation pass without a single opposition vote? She
certainly seems in favor of compromise now…but where was her empathy for “the
other” during that session?
Why was Christian Lefty silent when the Obama Administration was
caught—redhanded, too!—weaponizing the IRS to punish Christian 501c(3)
organizations? Why was she openly cheering the Senate approval of two Supreme
Court justices who were ardently pro-abortion? Truly, 34 million unborn
children deserve to know where her Voice of Justice was then. As those same
SCOTUS justices proceeded to write law—in contradistinction to the precise
method of law-writing prescribed by the U.S. Constitution—why was her voice not
lifted in support of the law of the land, rather than the outcome of the
decision? As innocent American civilians were slaughtered by Islamic
terrorists, why did she not demand an accounting from the Obama Administration
regarding its feckless policy toward a scourge whose name it dared not mention?
As the media whipped up a social-media hysteria against law enforcement in the
past 5 years, contra the demonstrably provable facts, where was her voice then?
Does she not speak for those we’ve appointed to enforce our laws, or just those
who blatantly defy them? And where was her Voice For Justice during the GOP primaries, when there were several perfectly good candidates who represented the American prioritization of individual liberties? She was nowhere to be found until after You-Know-Who had been nominated--and her silence helped make it happen.
She claims an empathy toward “immigrants,” but where was her
empathetic voice when hundreds of thousands of them came to our country legally
and in good faith? She lifted not a whisper for them….but has spoken in support
of those who hold them in contempt. And—perhaps most egregiously—how, in an age
in which we have peer-reviewed research that conclusively demonstrates the
damage that centralized government largesse does to the poor, does she continue
to frame her support for paternalism as a Christ-centered concern for the poor?
How can one so learned not know the same facts that the rest of the world
already knows—that socialism is a failed and murderous experiment that has been
abandoned every place it’s been tried?
She spends her days issuing jeremiadic lectures to future
theologians on the small-minded theocratic thinking of the Christian Right in
the 80’s—those rubes voting for people who shared their values!—and her nights
advocating resistance to the same group of people today because, in her view,
they failed to vote for someone who shared their values. Just like the
“Christian Right” she despises more than the devil himself, she sees her
government as a theocracy—but with a different God. A redistribution scheme
that perpetualizes the poor, an academic system that infantilizes the adults of
tomorrow, an immigration system that is predicated on her own eisegetical
understanding of scriptural empathy—she has constructed a God Who looks
remarkably like Her—so naturally, she’s “with Her.”
Christian Lefty will go the way of the dodo, the passively obedient
national churches during the Third Reich, and NOW. And the real reason why is
because she was silent when it mattered most. Her “Voice in the Wilderness”
schtick is not believable in the face of the supreme injustices that have been
tolerated in the name of “diversity” and “being on the right side of history”
for the last eight years. She is on the side of the baby-killers, not the
angels. She lifts her voice for the property-takers, not the poor. She would
sacrifice the security of the citizens of her own country rather than take
steps to secure our border—all in the service of “empathy.” She has “empathy,”
alright—just not with American Christians, for whom she reserves her darkest
disdain. It never dawned on her to raise her voice in defense of individual
liberties because such constitutionalism is not as Twitter-friendly and sexy as
a Christian wearing a rainbow frock and tweeting insults toward Baptist
churches. She is as interested in “compromise” and “dialogue” as she ever
was—which is to say, not at all. Her real religion is the state, and her real
church the media who make her feel that she is “in the majority” and “on the
right side.” She is a Lefty first and a Christian as an identity-related
afterthought.
When, at last, the state she has so lovingly championed finally
comes for her—as it always does—she will doubtless look around for someone to
raise their voice for justice on her behalf. But those who could have done so
will be long gone—crushed under the weight of her own misplaced empathies and
the Leviathian whom her voice supported.
Justice, indeed.
