Phil Christman. Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Eerdmans Publishing, 2025. $23.99. 229 pp.
When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to write a book. At the time, I had a popular libertarian blog, and I was just easing into talking about my faith in connection to my politics. America was fresh out of the George W. Bush years and still routinely arguing about civil liberties, due process, torture, mass surveillance, and regime-change wars. These were (and are) issues of highest concern to me as a libertarian. I was dismayed that so many of my fellow Christians did not seem to share that concern. I began pitching a book that, had it been published, may well have been titled, Why Christians Should Be Libertarians.
That personal history brought me to Phil Christman’s new volume, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, with a basic attitude of sympathy. I’ve appreciated other writing from Christman, who is rightfully known as a stylish essayist. I understand very well how an author would embark on a project like this.
Moreover, though it might come as a surprise to Christman—who reliably treats libertarians as enemies who are “mindlessly” happy with the world as it is—he and I have commonalities in faith and politics alike. We are both Christians, of course, unable to stop “bothering with this Jesus stuff” despite discomfort with evangelical expectations of emotive experience as confirmation of faith. And we are both eager to see the American church expand how it serves our communities and prays for those in government.
We share some policy impulses, too, especially opposition to war and support for more compassionate immigration policy. Indeed, though I am decidedly not a leftist, I could sign on to nearly all of Christman’s briefest summary of leftist belief: that “we live in a moral universe,” that work is an “inescapable expression of our social nature and an opportunity to glorify God,” that kings (representing authoritarian leaders generally) are bad, and that everyone is our neighbor. Many politically conservative Christians would likely say the same.
Nevertheless, for all these favorable beginnings, I came away from Why Christians Should Be Leftists disappointed. This is a book with real merits: Christman’s personal testimony is not to be missed, and it is worthwhile for those of us who aren’t leftists to read about contemporary leftism from someone within the fold. Christman is commendably willing to criticize his own circles, both political and religious. His short guide to various leftist tendencies is illuminative, though its disuse of online terms (shitlib, tankie, and so on) may be a loss to political novices. And his conversational footnotes can be delightful.
But Why Christians Should Be Leftists is also a book with real problems of editing, accuracy, and argument, as well as a bizarre and almost universally objectionable idea of gender. Brief volumes like this offer much to admire when they are tightly written and deal with major issues in swift and competent dispatch. Christman sometimes enters that mode here, but too often he does not. I’ll focus this critique on his handling of Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and that bit on gender. But first, two smaller notes.
One concerns a mention of Black infant mortality in America. Christman is making a case that life in the United States today “looks pretty similar to the way [life] looked under feudalism.” This is a literally incredible claim, and naturally he must immediately retreat—acknowledging, for example, that we have “greater life expectancy” than medieval peasants, though “the infant mortality rate for Black children in the United States is at positively pre-modern levels and has been for years.”
This is blatantly, demonstrably false. The Black infant mortality rate is indeed higher than that of white infants—roughly double: 10.9 vs. 4.5 per 1,000 as of 2022—but this is nowhere close to pre-modern levels. In 1800, the overall U.S. infant mortality rate was 462.89 per 1,000 children; in 1900 it was 238.76 per 1,000. Every infant death is a horror, but 10.9 and 462.89 are not similar numbers—thank God. An editor should have caught this.
An editor should also have caught things like the near-repetition of arguments about the effects of welfare programs and charities on pages 15 and 21 and of comments about the history of northern U.S. evangelicals in footnotes on 19 and 57. But a markedly more significant failure is how Christman engages Hayek, whom he never directly quotes and whose ideas he substantially mischaracterizes.
Now, I should pause to reiterate that I come to Christman’s book with quite different economic views. I raised an eyebrow at his treatment of Hayek precisely because I’ve read and liked Hayek. When Christman describes capitalism as a situation in which the means of production are “allowed to belong to individual people, who have a legal right to pass it on to their children, sell it to other individual people, or whatever else they might take a mind to do with it,” I think that sounds just fine.
I also have a significantly different understanding of the nature of politics. Christman describes it in terms of practices like “how we parent” and inclinations like “whether we freak out about having a homeless shelter built on our street.” I think politics is most fundamentally about deciding what we think is either so bad or so necessary that we’re willing to pass a law about it and enforce that law on pain of fines, asset forfeiture, deportation, prison, and, ultimately, death by the hand of the state, whether via execution or police reaction to a resisted arrest.
I often thought, while reading this book, that Christman would object to libertarians far less if he grasped this underlying attention to the state’s use of its claimed monopoly on licit violence. I thought it most often in the section on Hayek, though that is far from the whole of this section’s problems.
In this telling, Hayek is opposed to regulation “for the sake of values” (by which Christman means moral claims as distinguished from scientific facts) and interested in “do[ing] an end run” around questions like the existence of God and the purpose and nature of humanity. Neither account is true.
In The Road to Serfdom, the work Christman references, Hayek does argue for the free market on grounds of efficiency. But he is most deeply opposed to “the coercive and arbitrary intervention of authority” (emphasis Hayek’s) in people’s lives. Hayek contends that loss of economic freedom—as in a socialist, communist, or fascist system—will eventually and perhaps inevitably lead to loss of personal freedoms of speech, religion, and the like. Furthermore, he grounds this attention to liberty of all kinds in “the respect of Christianity for the individual man and the belief that it is desirable that men should be free to develop their own individual gifts and bents.”
Hayek may be wrong in drawing these connections. Christman argues that classical liberalism of this type “claw[s] back” personal liberty “in the name of property,” and he could be right. But Hayek is not dismissing the God-ordained morality of the universe. He is proposing a means of securing freedom, human rights, and prosperity while avoiding what he sees—in 1944, living in Britain because he’d been unwilling to stay in his native Austria under Nazi control—as the grave risks of authoritarian violence that undergird forcible market interventions.
Christman gets Hayek wrong on specific policies, too. In a passage that begins as parody of Hayek, he writes:
If what The People want is to cut down all the trees in the Amazon in pursuit of profit, then it’s undemocratic and unfree to overrule The People on this point. In contrast, socialists, and some other flavors of leftists, believe that the market is not a perfect representation of what people want or need. They turn to law, government, and other institutions, at least in the short term, to keep economic activity from trumping other concerns, like, oh, environmental collapse.
Here is what Hayek says in The Road to Serfdom about cutting down trees:
The successful use of [free market] competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours, to require certain sanitary arrangements, to provide an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. There are, too, certain fields where the system of competition is impracticable. For example, the harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question.
Another example: Shortly before the Hayek section, Christman suggests that “the complaint is constant” about “welfare policies and charity programs” from libertarians and conservatives. But Hayek in Serfdom acknowledges that prices in a free market can be “cruelly high” and explicitly envisions some kind of universal social safety net, “some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health,” as well as a “comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”
Put together, this easily amounts to something like universal basic income, universal health care, and perhaps universal home and auto insurance—and that’s on top of environmental, sanitation, and labor regulations. Is this, in Christman’s phrasing, a vision of a world that has “descend[ed] into a kind of high-tech warlordism,” a “Mad Max scenario” with “the abolition of the age of consent” in which a “nine-year-old [can] fetch herself a high brideprice”? It very obviously is not.
Economics is of primary interest for Christman, but he occasionally touches on the identitarian issues that have dominated left-of-center discourse in the last five years. On race, he sensibly couples Christian admiration for Black church perseverance with an apparent leaning toward a class-first approach to structural inequality instead of “the neurotic-white-guilt-industrial-complex.”
He has relatively little to say on matters of sex and gender. An early page speaks favorably of “talk[ing] yourself into” affirming theology on the basis of personal relationships with LGBTQ people—“not necessarily rejecting the authority of the Bible, but certainly thinking again how precisely we make sense of” it.
The more notable mention comes toward the end, when Christman expresses his desire for American leftism to be populated not only by “Serious Intellectuals, passionate speechmakers, people who write epically indignant threads, and depressed young people,” but by “Christian moms. Of all genders.”
He says the “all genders” line once, then reiterates it on the next page, then triples down in a footnote praising an unnamed friend. This friend is “a stay-at-home dad,” Christman says, who once shared his literary interests. “Now,” however, “he carries a big bag everywhere and has mastered the intricacies of his children's impossibly enriching days. He is a mom. I am so incredibly proud of him.”
He is a mom? Look, I know it’s just a footnote, a nice comment about a good friend. I want to honor that intent and how lovely it is for Christman to memorialize the friendship in print.
But motherhood is not carrying a big purse and keeping a calendar. And a father does not become a “mom”—a creature of domestic purpose, a toter of bags and driver of minivans, held in contrast to thinkers of high thoughts about literature—because he leaves formal employment to care for his children. This man is not a mom. He is a father, and Christman somehow manages to diminish motherhood and fatherhood, woman and man alike by calling his friend a “mom.”
He is a mom may be facially progressive, a tribute to contemporary absurdities about the interchangeability of male and female, a token of validity for nonsense about “birthing parents” and “chestfeeding” and “moms” with penises. That’s bad enough. But along the way, it is functionally regressive, a leftist spin on outdated tripe about dad as “Mr. Mom” because he’s managed to get the kids to the park by himself.
This lack of novelty recurred for me throughout Why Christians Should Be Leftists. For all its good points, Christman’s case for leftism will be essentially familiar to anyone who is reasonably well-informed about political theory and postures in America.
I finished the book heartened by Christman’s repeated insistence that his leftism must be characteristically Christian, that Christian teachings on peace, the imago Dei, and the certain hope of Christ’s return and final victory must always shape and, yes, constrain his political beliefs, goals, and tactics. Certainly, leftists should be Christians. The reverse, not so much.
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