I got a review copy of Chelsen Vicari’s “Distortion: How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel & Damaging the Faith.” I’m not sure if I am actually going to write a full review. I guess I’m deliberating on that. I’m using this post to outline why I feel ambivalent about actually going forward with a thorough, critical review.

First, let me establish that Vicari has a tough job. She’s a young woman writing on Christian faith and politics, and that can be a rough gig. Trust me: I know. And out of a certain solidarity I hesitate to, y’know, totally lay into her work here. On the other hand, there is some ugly stuff afoot in her book, and I try not to let personal affinities get in the way of recognizing problems for what they are. There are a lot of problems here.

Point of order: I felt inclined to look at this book because it claims it is about the “new Christian left.” It is actually about three separate but similar contingencies, though it is not aware of the divisions between them. It is about new Christian movements in LGBTQ venues; it is about people who are vaguely affiliated with the political left who consider themselves Christian but do not necessarily see their leftism as directly motivated by their Christianity; and it is about young Christians who are disenchanted with Boomer-style Christian conservatism on climate change, war, etc. All this is to say: this book is emphatically not about any kind of sophisticated ‘Christian leftism’, e.g. a political leftism that claims its roots in Christian ethics. This book is totally ahistorical. It does not remotely realize entire parliaments in European and Latin American countries are wholly dominated by straight up Christian socialists. It thinks in terms of contemporary American political binaries — abortion-bad-free-market-good versus abortion-good-free-market-bad, basically — and cannot fathom anything much more nuanced than that. It conflates ‘socialism’ with ‘welfare programs’ in that callow, almost nose-thumbing way Sean Hannity does. So if you’re looking for any kind of dense, serious consideration of Christian leftism in its most robust formulations, you’re not going to find it here.

So with all that established, here is a review of a single chapter, “Unmasking the Social Justice Facade.” What could this mean? When you unmask a facade, is one mask actually wearing yet another mask? This is typical of the entire writing style. Christopher Hitchens once said if you gave Jerry Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox. Similarly if it were possible to give this text an enema, you could publish it in a fortune cookie.

Vicari’s prose perambulates in a labyrinthine style. There is no sign posting. She is given to momentary lapses into personal narrative. Her chapter on “social justice” opens up with an anecdote about going to Haiti, and includes reminiscences on her college life: “it stunk to speak up in my political science classes and call for cuts in government entitlements.” My sympathy for political science professors has never been so strong.

Cut through the fluff of personal interjection and she has three major opponents in this chapter: Christians who are against war; Christians who are for racial justice; and Christians who are for “government overreach.” There is also a completely random slam against TCU (Texas Christian University), a pretty swanky college in Fort Worth, Texas. Vicari conflates anti-war Christians, Christians who are interested in racial justice, and Christians who support welfare programs. The conflation is unfounded: as many libertarians hate American wars of imperialism as do hardcore Christian leftists, and this becomes a major problem for her argument later on.

Vicari’s pro-war argument is that Christian interest in peace “typically blurs peace with the appeasement of ruthless regimes that oppose human rights and, at times, vilify the United States.” This will strike all thinking persons as oddly tautological. Of course regimes that are under attack by the US vilify the US, but do we attack them because they vilify us, or do they vilify us because we attack them? Vicari considers the matter settled and abandons it, but the takeaway is that American wars are justified by their American-ness. If nothing about this argument strikes you as remotely related to Christianity, you have stumbled upon the central conceit of this work.

Moving onto racial justice, Vicari reports the following: “Faculty from George Fox University presented a paper that attempted to establish parallels ‘between the oppression of the ancient Hebrews, the South Africans during Apartheid, and minorities in our current society.’ The presented concluded his abstract with a quote from Malcom X, a proponent of violence during the civil rights movement. Perhaps the presenter missed English class the day his professor reviewed irony.” For Vicari, this is symptomatic of what she calls “justice theology” a made-up term which she epitomizes in one Jeremiah Wright, a person of no fame or influence aside from that which right wingers wetly dream up. In her notes, Vicari sources this post, “Black Liberation Theology is Socialist“, rather than, say, the work of literally any black theologian who does liberation theology or social justice work. There is no Cornel West, not even any Gustavo Gutierrez; at one point Vicari explains that liberation theology “traces its roots back to the early twentieth century within Catholic and Protestant circles. Liberation theology,” she writes, “aimed to merge Marxism and Christianity largely in Latin America and Soviet Russia.” Vicari had better hope it’s no sin to lie, because that is flat out misleading right on the merits, and will immediately flag the attention of anyone with a historical knowledge of theology, whether their sympathies lean left or right. The simmering malice for black theologians should be enough to off-put the rest.

But another look at her passage here reveals basically the entire problem with her style of argument: Vicari cannot directly engage. Instead, she notes a tangentially related fact (“he quoted Malcom X, who is a bad man!”) and considers the actual argument (“racial oppression is present in the Bible and modern day and is wrong”) settled, even though she has not so much has touched it. This is how she proceeds with the entire ‘welfare’ section, such as it is.

Contra welfare, Vicari visits three arguments:

1.) “…the federal healthcare mandate’s infringement on Christians’ religious freedom by requiring taxpayers to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.”

2.) Citing Jerry Falwell: “[Jesus] never said that we should elect a government that would take money from our neighbor’s hand and give it to the poor.”

3.) “Let’s say I have a friend who is dependent on alcohol.”

In order, rebuttals:

1.) Your problem is with the specific layout of the ACA, not universal healthcare. It is also extremely strange to say your issue is what you’re being taxed to pay for, when the very next argument you produce is that it’s wrong to be taxed whatsoever.

2.) No, Jesus didn’t say ‘create social welfare programs.’ He also didn’t say not to. He did not provide the architecture of entire governments, just a moral guideline for just action. Social welfare programs fit just fine in a Christian ethical scheme of politics. Vicari addresses no such arguments, though, and in fact goes on to argue in favor of taxation so long as it supports Israel: “As American Christians we have a part in the Abrahamic covenant too. God said in Genesis 12:3 that He would treat nations according to the way they treat Israel.” He also said however you treat the poor is how you treat Him. But while taxing to militarily support an entirely different country doesn’t violate Vicari’s sense of “government overreach” versus “Christian outreach” (after all, you could argue Christians should simply voluntarily pool their money and donate it to Israel), taxing to support the poor does violate that sensibility. Clearly she is not concerned with the ethics of taxing or the question of ‘big government’; she’s just a Republican with the same schizophrenia they all have when it comes to the size of government.

3.) Even if you take the dependency argument seriously, it doesn’t do the work she thinks it does. Do people get addicted to healthcare? Do they quit working because there is parental leave? Universal kindergarten? She is out of her depth here, and cannot really articulate what welfare even is; she gives no examples of actual welfare policies that are in violation of Christian ethics in a demonstrable way. It is enough for her to argue by analogy of alcohol dependency, because her audience probably already agrees with her that the poor are, by and large, entitlement junkie welfare queens. To no neutral party would this analogy be otherwise persuasive.

So what is the way forward, for Vicari? Here is her closing salvo:

“A brighter future for Christianity’s social witness starts with a transformation through the saving grace of Jesus Christ; pursuing truth in Scripture; and caring for the orphan, the widow,  and the sex trafficking victim while behaving morally in accordance with the Word of God. Our goal should never be to let go of the truth in order to reach out to others; it should be to seek prudential justice through a healthy civil society based on law and liberty for all.”

In other words, the prescription is so vague and non-specific that almost nobody would disagree with it, but that’s exactly what makes it useless. It isn’t a path forward, it’s not a plan; it’s a lot of things that sound good but have zero political valence whatsoever, and that’s a problem when you’re trying to argue that your wisdom should replace social welfare regimes. The Christian leftist could just as easily argue Christian leftism gives us superior prudential justice in a civil society based on law and liberty for all. And how, one might ask, is this not justice theology? You’d never know: she doesn’t define her terms. You just sort of swim in an ether of dog-whistling and come away dazed but empty-handed, which is how propaganda should make you feel.

So I’m not sure there’s much here for me to review. It’s the type of book that will be forced upon youth groups or picked up by concerned soccer moms who’ve caught their sons with PeTA pamphlets or their daughters with posters of makeup-wearing nancy boys like Jared Leto. This won’t ever wind up on a syllabus, though I fear it will probably win its author plenty in speaking honoraria and whatnot. And alas, there’s nothing a mere blogger can do about that! But if you were thinking, “is this where I’m going to find a nuanced, historical, somber critique of Christian leftism?” then I hope I have at least saved you a sawbuck.