The Left Needs Spirituality

By Tess GC

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Left Catholic is getting a name change, while our content won't be changing too much at all. Here on Substack, we’ve decided to give ourselves a name that matches the breadth of topics we’ve covered so far, and are looking to address in the future. So from now on, we’ll be Spirit of Solidarity. Left Catholic is still an important part of what we address, so it will be a regular column within this larger umbrella. You can find the Left Catholic column on Spirit of Solidarity’s page.

Since we began a Left Catholic substack, our tag line has been: “We're liberation-focused Catholics navigating the clown show of our political and religious landscape. We're talking about being in real solidarity with each other, and figuring out how religion and spirituality can help us do this.” We pretty much want to keep asking these exact questions, but in a way that’s not just speaking primarily to Catholics. We’re always coming from our own Catholic backgrounds, but the Catholic name is a real turnoff (for good reason) to a lot of people who we’d like to reach and be in conversation with, both religious and secular. Most of our articles haven’t been specifically about Catholicism, although many have addressed Christianity, and many also contain broader questions for the secular Left. We want to continue thinking, writing, and interacting at this intersection of political organizing and solidarity, spirituality, religion, and sometimes Catholicism.

When I decided to go to seminary, one of the big questions I wanted to wrestle with was why the political Left was so messy, and what we were missing, when we said we stood for the highest ideals. After being caught up in the drama and infighting of progressive or Left organizing and activist groups, I thought maybe the political religiosity of a progressive seminary could help with my idea that some sort of spiritual grounding could help us all, and help me answer why it was so difficult for us to get along, win campaigns, hell, even keep liking each other.

It turns out, progressive seminary opened a whole new can of worms (think leftists and progressives are a hard-headed bunch? Try some who think their beliefs are backed by God’s will!). But I did find that this question about how to make the Left a better place to be, a better environment in which to ground one’s life, kept percolating. A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called “Would you join the moralizers?” about both the religious and secular Lefts’ problems with moralizing and shaming. In a kind of sister piece to that, today I’m writing about why I think the Left’s ideals of solidarity, mutual aid, and liberation are in fact a deep spirituality that the Left should recognize as such to help our movements. Many people have these ideals on the Left, but we often fail to put those ideals into practice, much like religious people, and I’m thinking about Christians in particular, fail to practice what they preach. Recognizing this spirituality, what I’m calling the spirituality of the Left, could be a game changer for both leftists trying to organize and win, and for grappling with Christianity and religion more broadly, huge forces that shape our world socially and politically.

Solidarity especially is both a practical and profound idea, and it’s through exploring solidarity as a spirituality that I think we can address the Left’s struggles to actualize our ideals of building and maintaining power, treating all people with dignity and respect, and changing the world from the bottom-up.

Principles as spirituality

There isn’t one answer to why the Left struggles to gain power. I think a lot of this struggle is because we’re fighting in a socioeconomic and political system that was designed by and for those who would like to keep exploiting us. A lot of us are also waking up to the fact that our infighting, and focusing our attention primarily on levels of privilege – who amongst the have-littles has more, or struggles slightly less – has ultimately aided the “haves,” and kept us fighting over the crumbs. In “Would you join the moralizers?” I talked about how moralizing and shaming contribute to breaking our solidarity with each other, and don’t help us build movements that can gain real power and make real, lasting change. We need people to join and contribute to our movements, and the most surefire way to convince them is because it’s in their best interest to do so – we’re addressing problems that affect them too. However, solidarity, this idea that’s at the heart of what we’re trying to invite others into, is an interesting concept. Solidarity is both a practical and profound idea – its practicality says, “I have your back so you have mine” – while it dives deep into the depths of some of the most profound and transcendent experiences of our lives: an injury to you is an injury to me, because we are interconnected. Because in the other I see myself. Because I’m not sure what kind of life I’m living if I’m cut off from the suffering of the life around me.

Some might ask, “why does it matter if leftists have a sense of deeper meaning, or even transcendence in their lives? Why can’t solidarity just be practical?” And to this I would say, without understanding solidarity, mutual aid, and liberation as conscious practices of spirituality I think a lot of leftists can lose sight of the bigger picture, or find ourselves burned out, alienated, breaking the solidarity we want to have with each other. The act of struggling together to live better lives is an act full of purpose and meaning that is in and of itself the lived embodiment of spirituality. 

I want to be clear that I’m not saying people need Jesus. They don’t need God, capital G-O-D, the man in the sky. They don’t need to go to church or prayers or services of another kind – but I think we all do need to feel our aliveness. And to me, feeling your aliveness is feeling the spirit, god, the transcendent, whatever you want to call it; feeling a sense of being part of something bigger, something all-encompassing happening all around us. As leftists, what gives us a deeper sense of meaning and interconnection with one another? What keeps us insisting on the dignity of other people and of ourselves – what is the force behind our sense that there is good in each other, and we want to keep fighting. This ‘what’ is one of the truest things that binds us across place, time, and experience, it’s what many people have and do call spirit, and what many others call solidarity, high ideals, and on and on.

I think a life without some semblance of spirituality is usually a pretty bleak one – and that’s spirituality, broadly defined. Most people have something that animates their life, gives it meaning and purpose, and from which they derive their sense of morality and ethics. The Left offers this to people – atheists, agnostics, and religious alike – and in its expansiveness and depth, these ideals of solidarity, mutual aid, and liberation are about as universal and welcoming as you can find. In fact, these principles are so integral to the kind of world I want to live in, I think most religious and spiritual traditions should look to, or recognize their own roots in the vision that the Left is trying to present.

Grappling with religion 

Many (maybe even most?) religious traditions are pretty messy in our modern world, and Christianity is up there with the champs. In the past couple of years, I’ve noticed more leftists asking questions about religion, and Christianity in particular, as its role in the rise of the political Right is undeniable. Christianity saturates the foundations of the Western world and the United States. In U.S. history, our darkest chapters are very much religious history as well as economic and political. For the Left to engage and combat the Right, we have to understand the underpinnings of spirituality, or even religiosity in ourselves, so we can understand how it operates for other people – and it’s crucial that we recognize how many Americans are religious or think in religious or spiritual terms, so we can present an alternative social vision in their own language; in this case, what a spiritual, religious, or Christian life asks of them. We have an inclusive, solid, tried-and-true answer to this question: our vision of solidarity, mutual aid, and liberation. 

It’s also something I’ve written about before, in “Would you join the moralizers?”, but we also have to grapple with religion and spirituality because it’s very difficult to be brought up in the United States without absorbing a fair amount of Christian thinking and morality. As I said before, “I think the secular Left needs to realize that to reject or have no particular affiliation with Christianity in the United States doesn’t mean its participants haven’t absorbed many modern Christian ideals and ways of seeing the world.” And this, however-latent Christianity, really shows in many of the problems that the current Left deals with.

Like many people, being introduced to leftist politics in college opened up my world, and helped me make sense of the inconsistencies I saw in the world around me. Taking a class on Marx’s philosophy in college revolutionized my way of understanding the world. I think many of us on the Left, broadly speaking, share some experience of feeling like we’ve had the rug pulled out from under us – you thought the world was one way, and then you were introduced to the idea that it may in fact operate very differently than you’d been taught your whole life. Dealing with this experience tends to push us into alternative social groups and spaces where like-minded people congregate, which are also smaller, more niche groups. Many of us have turned to these spaces for community and support.

When the Left operates from its religiosity in our communities, and I do mean religiosity, we can do serious damage to our comrades. We ostracize and reprimand each other, and create stringent in-group norms, and many people find themselves cast out from the place they went to escape the violence and persecution of the mainstream – the place that was supposed to offer refuge, be the alternative. And then it’s not. The pain and damage that that does, both to individual people and to our movements, is enormous. 

I think the more I address the wounded parts of myself, the less individualistic I actually get – and the more convinced I am that we need a revolution of our tired and embattled selves to address the way we’re treating each other on the Left. I think the more we engage in truly deep work with ourselves, letting ourselves feel full emotions, traversing the landscape of our experiences that wounded and traumatized us, the better we can forgive ourselves, love ourselves, refuse to believe that we’re bad at heart – and do those things for others. And in that, we can begin to operate less from our religiosity, and more from a transcendent solidarity.

Going forward

I hope you’ll all think on these topics with me going forward. A lot of the problems of the Left are problems of human beings trying to get together and change the world that’s stacked against them. It’s really difficult to be conscious that we’re living in a world that’s inhospitable to some of our most basic desires for deep care, love, and connection. It’s also really hard to see our efforts to change things fail over years and years, with so much work put in by so many people. But we have the tools and frameworks that we need. I just think we need to lean into them more fully and let them affect every part of our lives. We’re fighting for something that taps into the very question of what it means to be alive and to live well. These are profound questions we ask, and they have practical prescriptions. 

As we make this slight transition and move forward, we’ll continue examining spirituality, religion, and politics, and we hope you’ll be in conversation with us.