Shades of Blue: Being Faithful on the Left
Article in the Nogales International

November 18, 2005
Gail McGrew Eifrig, Sonoita, Arizona



Is there a religious left? Of course there is, though its voice has been a lot quieter than the one on the right. People of faith occupy the whole width of the political spectrum, and despite what you may have been hearing lately, there are plenty of us on the left-ward end.

The general public knows what the ‘values issues’ are for the religious right, because these hot items have been actively debated in the public sphere: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, creationism in schools, school prayer, the Ten Commandments and Nativity scenes in public places and so on.

And on the left? Faithful people on the left side of the political spectrum also believe that their values are mandated by their religious beliefs. We tend to oppose war making, capital punishment, economic policy that favors wealth and widens the gap between rich and poor, restrictions placed by the state on private life, and careless use of the physical world for immediate gratification. We support a national strength through alliances and global cooperation, and are committed to a definition of national strength that begins with healthy children in prosperous homes, building communities that are good for all.

I suppose my point here is that all people of faith seek to live good lives, and to influence others to be good as well. The difficulty comes as we differ about what is morally bad by the standards of our belief, and what ought to be legally wrong--wrong for everyone. Theft, for example, is fairly uniformly believed to be morally wrong; we have all agreed that it should be legally wrong as well. Lying is wrong morally, but you don’t have to look hard to find that people do not agree on just how wrong it is; lying is only legally wrong in certain very limited circumstances.

Morally, adultery is always wrong. But few people, even those on the religious right, believe that it should be illegal. But these things shift, don’t they? Slavery, now regarded as both morally and legally wrong, divided religious people in this country; pious slaveholders believed that though slavery might be morally wrong, it was economically necessary, and therefore should not be legally wrong. On the other side, religiously motivated abolitionists believed that holding slaves was not only morally wrong for individuals, but was a practice that could not be tolerated in a society of which they were a part; they thought that it should, in fact, be made illegal. And eventually it was, though with a great deal of bloodshed.

Take a more current issue. People of the religious left believe that it is morally wrong to pursue a war without at least following what theologians and philosophers have hammered out over centuries as what are called "just war criteria." The current war in Iraq, for example, fulfills none of those criteria. Though many on the left have tried to present the case that this war ought to be illegal, we have not persuaded the majority of our fellow citizens that this should be the case. We believe that the war is immoral, but we have to acknowledge that it is not illegal.

My point is this: religious faith, though it is personal, is never a private matter. All people who try to live out their faith in the real world have views about what ought, and ought not, to be permissible behavior, about what should be priorities for national spending, what actions should be required of all citizens. To be on the religious left is to seek to live according to the mandates of our faith, but at the same time to recognize the validity of the choices other people make, whether they make them as responses to their own faiths, or without reference to any faith at all.

Where there is disagreement about which immoralities should be illegal, the religious left would leave people free to choose their behavior, even if they choose to do what we consider the morally wrong thing. We believe, after all, that a human being free to choose right or wrong is fundamental to God’s creating vision.