The Democratic Platform Platform is one that serves, helps, and assists human beings. For those who are religious, those who consider themselves Christians, they must not allow Conservatives, Right Wingers, Republicans to co-opt faith and religion.
Ed Simon wrote a piece titled “The Missing Piece in the Democrats’ Plan to Victory” that Democrats might want to consider embracing to tweak their narrative. He writes the following.
A German intellectual once wrote that “All property should be held in common’ and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required.” This wasn’t first said by the German intellectual you might expect, but rather was written four centuries before Karl Marx. They were the sentiments of Thomas Müntzer, a fiery preacher embroiled in the Peasant’s War of 1525, the largest mass working class uprising in Europe until the French Revolution. By the end of the rebellion, some 100,000 Germans were dead, and Müntzer executed.
What was Dr. Ed Simon trying to point out?
In popular discussion, where a stark distinction between left and right is often assumed, religion is seen as the provenance of the right. But the increasing visibility of various forms of left-wing religion not only proves that assertion to be spurious, it also demonstrates that theology never really left progressive politics. The contemporary British philosopher John Gray claims that “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.” Any consideration of our politics in this moment which doesn’t address religion will be lacking.
Müntzer’s theology, firmly grounded in his reading of scripture, seems uncannily “left-wing.” His movement advocated for common ownership of land, the abolition of the class system, and redistribution of wealth. Similarities between left-wing thought and past theologies aren’t superficial – there is a direct historical connection between them, as argued by historians like Norman Cohn and Christopher Hill.
Simon explains why Progressives should add faith to their repertoire.
Müntzer was much more radical than the business-friendly Democratic party. Yet for anyone on the left, a consideration of figures like Müntzer and other Christian radicals may provide a guide for how progressives, both religious and secular, can think of themselves. Religious rhetoric is among the most potent vocabularies in the human experience. Whether wed to conventional religious belief or not, scriptural and theological language gives us a tongue to discuss injustice, inequality, and inequity – and to condemn them in no uncertain terms. The wonkish terminology of secular liberalism doesn’t hold the imagination of people in the same manner.
The last paragraph of Simon’s article sums it up.
If progressives are to ever discover a strategy out of the wilderness of political defeat it will have to be, in part, written in the language of faith. Furthermore, this can be done while respecting the integrity of secularism, for one must also acknowledge the “religious” roots of that particular worldview. Modern secular politics is a continuation of religion by other means. That’s true whether we’re individually “religious” or not. Forgetting that score is to trade one’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
As a humanist, I do not have a problem meeting people where they are even if it means adding religion and faith to the narrative. One cannot expect everyone to think alike, but there are many values we have in common that are in fact mostly progressive.
