Would you join the moralizers?

By Tess GC

Both the Christian Left and the non-religious Left have a moralizing problem, and this new year seems like a good time to talk about it. I’m feeling, and I think many of you are too, exhausted by social media, and exhausted by enraging world events we have little control over.

I want to talk about moralizing on the Left because it’s been making my exhaustion a lot more acute, and sapping away my energy to organize and be politically engaged – which is directly contrary to what the Left is trying to do. Essentially, moralizing (telling people how and what it’s acceptable to think, feel, and do based on your own pretty binary moral code), guilting, and shaming people aren’t effective long-term strategies to mobilize most people, and we should talk about it.

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Moralizing on the Christian Left/among progressive Christianity, and moralizing on the political Left more generally are closely linked, and to understand many problems of the political Left in the United States, I would argue that we need to start by understanding Christianity.

Saying that Christianity has a moralizing problem probably isn’t news to anyone outside of it – but I think a lot of progressive and leftist Christians don’t have an issue with it, and often unknowingly spend a great deal of their time doing it. It makes a lot of sense why highly moralized positions have become the default of progressive and leftist Christians: Most obviously that we come from a tradition whose dominant interpretations are highly moralistic, and have become increasingly focused on the personal choices and morality of the individual, in tandem with the individualizing nature of our dominant world ideology, liberal capitalism. There’s also a difference between moralizing at the individual, and moralizing at the system, and it’s the individual that I think is causing real harm to both the Christian Left and the non-religious Left.

The non-religious Left is largely allergic to religion, and often for good reasons – many people never had a religious background, or have explicitly left the toxicity of much of modern Christianity (or other traditions) behind. 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. In fact, I’ve experienced the most intense moralizing, shaming, and guilting I’ve ever experienced in leftist and progressive spaces. Fueled by the religious-like zeal of “Being Good and Being Right,” many leftists, at times myself included, fall into needling at the already sympathetic to behave in ways that leftists have decided are best, and believe only the things they have decided are the right things to believe.

I can’t count the number of times, both in the past few months, and more generally in my life that I’ve been told by the social justice-minded what I can and can’t do; what I am and am not allowed to think or feel; what I have to care about, have to think or have to feel; how I have to behave, how I have to spend my time and my energy. I think all of this is well-meaning, and I think the stated intent is often to mobilize people, convince them to engage politically, or remind them of their values. I think underneath, however, people who say these things are also motivated by fear, feelings of helplessness, and misdirected anger at the situations we find ourselves in socially and politically. Rather than mass mobilizing people who are engaging from a place of real buy-in, these strategies ultimately end up needling at already sympathetic people, wearing them down, and eventually burning many of them out.

It’s tough when the goal of political involvement and organizing is to influence individual people en masse to become politically engaged and understand the world in some way similarly to how we’re understanding it. Unfortunately we often don’t realize that the tactics we’re using to try to mobilize people are really trying to activate the guilt and shame complexes that many people have. I think there can be a fine line between moralizing and just pointing out the reality of how messed up and inhumane the world we live in is. That line of thinking is important to discuss and try to discern together, because it has to do with the kind of world we want to create that’s different from the one we’re living in. Personally, I have found myself pretty uninterested in a lot of progressive and leftist Christian spaces because I feel like I’m swapping out one set of totalizing rules and norms for another set, only the new ones are more covert, but just as rife with consequences for deviation and questioning. I think most people eventually realize that, and find other places to put their energy, or drop out of political engagement altogether.

Freedom and autonomy

I don’t like being told what to do, and I know a lot of other people don’t either. I grew up in a society pushing and pulling me all the time, like most of us, and it made me pretty reactive to authority. I also grew up in a place with a real libertarian bent, with a lot of people who don’t like being told what to do by people and powers who don’t know much about them, or have any real accountability to the voices of the people. In that way, I know that most people, especially many on the Left, share some degree of this desire for autonomy and freedom, born into a world that denies us those things. 

I don’t want to participate in a Left that bosses people around, hanging threats of immorality over them, or badgers people into behaving in certain ways because of their identities. I think a robust Left needs to be able to take people as they are, without forcing them to change themselves based on a set of arbitrary determinations about “the right way to be” (within reason, of course – for example, if you’re a Nazi, you fundamentally can’t participate in a Left vision of liberation for all). 

There will always be a series of “what if” scenarios when it comes to what kind of behavior and opinions are tolerable enough to come under the umbrella of the Left, and some of these concerns come from well-meaning people, and some come from people who aren’t serious about building a widespread political project, whose goal is to gain power to create a better reality for all of us. I think a good use of time in this new year is for all of us who hope for this goal to spend some time really discerning our own capacities for working with others who don’t align with all the things we believe. Organizing isn’t about feeling good all the time, or always feeling comfortable. It’s about finding what we have in common with others who are suffering, and forging connection and power through a mutual recognition of our plights. 

What Christianity has to offer

If Christianity has anything to offer a liberated world, which I think it does, it’s the story of a movement led by Jesus who was speaking to people’s harsh realities under a crushing empire. There’s a scholar called William Herzog who wrote a book, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed. In it he talks about how he thinks the goal of Jesus’s parables in the New Testament weren’t to tell moral tales where the authority figures are equated to God, and the bad actors to humans – he thinks Jesus was telling stories to the Israelite peasantry who would recognize themselves and their neighbors in the figures of these tales, under the thumb of various masters and the larger thumb of the Romans’ imperial system. Jesus used these tales as tools of consciousness-raising, showcasing the social problems around them in the stories, and helping people come to the conclusion themselves that the system they were forced to operate in was pitting them against each other, harming them all.

I bring up this example because I think there’s a difference between the moralizing we often do, and consciousness-raising. A lot of us have lost, or haven’t been able to develop a very good understanding of who the best targets of our shaming are — people with real power. That’s not general groups of people based on specific identity categories, but those who have the money to sway our politics and economy, and elected officials. Moralizing at each other while most of us are just trying to survive on the increasingly smaller crumbs dropped by the ruling class has embittered and turned a lot of people away from the Left, and from Christianity, and I don’t blame them.

Helpful moralizing?

There’s a lot of interesting psychological and cultural questions here about the effectiveness and use of guilt and shame in different societies and cultures across time, but ultimately what I’m asking is: Do you, right now in this time and place, respond well to those tactics in your personal life? In your social life? Have they been long-term motivators for you to do things that you don’t have to do, but choose to do? Sometimes the answer might be yes, but I think for many, many people, in all honesty it’s a no.

There’s also the strategic question of how effective even non-individualistic moral movements are. A strong moral message has also been effective in some ways in American social movements – such as with the Civil Rights Movement, publicly led by religious, and largely Christian people. However, what I think moralizing Christians and Christian social movements often fail to realize is that the success of moral movements often hinges on them being the alternative to a more radical, often more militant threat to the powers that be (for example, the Black Panthers and other more radical, non-Christian movements); or, they aren’t particularly successful in their aims at all (I’m thinking of movements like Christian pacifist abolition, which ended in a Civil War, or the Temperance Movement). Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline points out the limited effectiveness of many pacifist movements, many of which were religiously or morally branded. One movement that I do think has done a good job in messaging for a moral movement is the current iteration of the Poor People’s Campaign, which calls itself a moral movement, but stays away from shaming individual people who they know aren’t responsible for the social and economic predicaments we’re in. 

It’s always a little awkward when the things I feel most equipped to talk about are the things I’m tired of doing myself. But I’ve moralized, I’ve been moralized at, and I’m interested in a different approach. As I said before, I’m pretty exhausted, and I know a lot of you are too – so as always, please take care of yourselves and of each other. I really believe that learning how to treat ourselves and each other better begins to bear fruit, as it helps us glimpse the possibility of a differently structured world for all of us.