Left/right political axes aren’t really that descriptive or helpful. Rather, I suppose, their helpfulness is far more limited than one might suppose. Conservative commentator and frequently-posterized Twitter personality Dinesh D’Sousa continues to deploy the ambiguity of these axes to stoke party-based division. He refuses to listen to actual historians when they explain that, yes, the Southern Strategy was real and that, yes, there was a shift between parties over civil rights. More recently, he’s attacked Greta Thunberg for having long braids and an opinion, likening her appearance to Nazi propaganda posters. He drives hard at a point of left/right confusion by referring to the Nazi Party as a leftist entity. This is, of course, absolute hogwash, and the receipts are all over on Twitter.
I’m not a historian. I’m a theologian. What concerns me in situations like this–where a heuristic is being used as a definitive part of discourse and not as a tool–is that it creates a false sense of safety in the middle. We want to think that we’re not that extreme. We don’t want to be seen as far-left or far-right, so we crave a middle space, as if there’s a Goldilocks Zone of political opinion. Those of us who are Christian may even try to reason that Jesus wouldn’t have been one of those extremists. He remembered the wisdom of Solomon, right?
Except that’s not what any of the depictions of Jesus in the Gospels show us. While they vary greatly in detail, they tend to agree on a few main points: Jesus sided with the poor, excluded, and oppressed; Jesus was against the exploitation of the state; Jesus was against pietistic false righteousness. Jesus, in other words, was not a centrist.
This makes sense if we listen to the Hebrew prophets and to those who’ve claimed their legacy. If we hear James Cone telling us that God sides with the oppressed, or if we hear Dolores Williams telling us that God does not author or require our suffering, then we come–I think–closer to a proper theological message. We should seek freedom and flourishing regardless of party affiliation. It is, after all, possible for God to actually be on one side or the other.
Maybe Jesus wouldn’t have thrown a brick through the window of a cafe during a protest, but I’m really sure he wouldn’t have thought there were very fine people on both sides of a Neo-Nazi rally.