‘Politics of the Cross’ Prescribes Progressivism and Orthodoxy

The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship
by Daniel K. Williams
Eerdmans 2021, 336 pages.

The Politics of the Cross by Daniel Williams is a straightforward, if at times painful, telling of American politics and Christianity from the mid-19th century onwards with recommendations for action today informed by the lessons of history.

The book’s tagline, “A Christian Alternative to Partisanship,” is a good descriptor of its content. Most of its pages are devoted to examining the ways in which Christian identification with Democrats and Republicans, for better and worse, has shaped the priorities of our politics.

Williams describes a mid-19th century Republican Party founded upon twin pillars of slavery abolition and Protestant Moralism. Progressing into the 20th century, Republicans closely aligned with middle-class Mainline Protestantism, to a degree that the Episcopal Church was known by some as “the Republican Party at prayer.” They embraced “the traditionally American Protestant ethic of hard work, individualism and ‘self-reliance’” which the Republican Party platform of 1928 explicitly endorsed as an antidote to the “feeling of dependence” on the federal government.”

Cold War-era Republicans rallied around anticommunism, nationalism and explicit display of religiosity to counter the Soviet Union’s atheism. Though understandable in its context, “their anticommunism sometimes led them to equate [Christianity] with a defense of the free market and to view all government poverty relief as a slippery slope toward socialist totalitarianism.”

Virulent anticommunism also led Republican Christians to disavow people including Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Christianity Today referred to as “the most notorious liar in the country.” 

Williams argues that excessive emphases on individual economic freedom and nationalistic anticommunism followed Republicans into the present era. Prioritization of national unity and free markets, Williams claims, came at the expense of ignoring systematic poverty and racism.

The Left’s modern liberal Protestant progressive idealism was illustrated in William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech. At the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century the “social gospel,” which combined deemphasis on the fallenness of individuals with optimism about the alleviation of all social ills through scientific central planning, came to define the Democrats. Roman Catholics also followed their church’s social teaching to support progressive economic policies.

In the 1950s and 60s, Democrats’ slide towards secularism began. However, the outward secularism of the Left actually masks the theological basis for their ideas of human rights and pluralism. Many younger white liberals in the church viewed struggles for Civil Rights and ending the Vietnam War as the moral causes of their times. They were extremely disappointed at the indifference or hostility of conservative white Christians to their social justice goals. This led them to join the Democratic party, where despite being talked about less, theology still played a strong role in shaping policy.

Williams views Democrats and Republicans today as most strongly divided over four categories: race, economics, abortion and human sexuality. In his analysis of how Christians should think of supporting one party over the other, he basically concludes that Democrats tend to be more right on economics and race, while Republicans are more correct on abortion and human sexuality.

Beginning with abortion, Williams points out that almost all Republican strategy has focused upon anti-abortion legislation. But, as a national ban on abortion appears an increasingly quixotic quest, it’s considering other strategies. One example would be financial support for “life support centers” or “crisis pregnancy centers.” Other options could include raising the minimum wage, free childcare and offering state-subsidized health care to mothers and their children. But, Williams also argues for a cultural and political shift that “centers on extending marriage access to the poor.” Marriage rates have declined sharply among the poor, making childrearing much harder. While Democrats are correct in emphasizing the role of the state in helping the poorest, Republicans are right to emphasize proper family formation as the best anti-poverty program.

On the sexuality front, Williams echoed that a primary goal of Christians should be the promotion of Biblical marriage between men and women. But, as with abortion, he was more interested in the economic problems at hand.

“In the past, cultural liberalism or the sexual revolution might have seemed to be the greatest threats to marriage, but today poverty is,” Williams writes. Financial stability for the working poor, many of whom would like to be married but feel they can’t afford it, would enable many marriages and probably keep many more together. In addition to higher minimum wages and universal healthcare, he also argued for prison reform on the basis that many men become unmarriageable if they’re incarcerated. Paid maternity leave and reunion of undocumented immigrant families were also recommendations to boost marriage.

Williams’ treatment of race, as with other topics, is unlikely to satisfy partisan Republicans and Democrats, but was nevertheless thoughtfully engaged with both sides of the debate.

For Conservatives, the opposite of racism is colorblindness where skin color is treated as irrelevant or nonexistent. For Progressives, color-consciousness replaces color blindness as the ideal, where particular attention must be paid to racial differences to hope to overcome them. 

It’s a tough balance to strike, between a Republican urge to pretend race isn’t real, which will not solve anything in the long term, and the extreme Democrats who want to completely redefine America and the world in racial terms. Williams doesn’t give the leftist extreme much attention, maybe because “Critical Race Theory” wasn’t a talking point when he wrote, but instead addresses areas where Conservatives and Progressives might find common ground. As with sexuality and abortion, progressive economic policies were his preferred remedy to an American legacy of explicit racial discrimination. 

Following generations of slavery, sharecropping and redlining, African-Americans suffer every social and physical malady at disproportionate rates. Conservatives assign blame with cultural problems like broken homes for continuing cycles of poverty, and they’re right to an extent; stable marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program. But, as Williams puts it, absent the economic stability prerequisite to build or rebuild social institutions it’s hard to see anything will change. It’s for this reason that Williams advocates for government subsidized healthcare, affordable housing, education and retirement plans.

“We do not have to choose between economic relief for the poor and promotion of marriage,” writes Williams. Especially since most poverty relief programs would have disproportionate effect upon minorities, anti-poverty programs are de facto anti-racist. Mass incarceration and immigration are other examples of areas where Williams challenges readers to reconsider. With America’s huge prison population, at what point is punitive justice worth the devastation to communities? And with immigration we have to consider a path to citizenship, because without it there will be a permanent under-class of undocumented immigrants, caught between worlds. 

Williams, like many Christians, probably feels politically homeless; his ideal candidate sounds like someone with the economically progressive ideology of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, but who is also Pro-Life and rhetorically defensive of institutions like marriage and religion. His solutions to our biggest problems are theologically orthodox and mostly anodyne, except towards those conservatives most deferential to free-market capitalism.

Some will disagree with his stances on immigration and police reform, and that’s understandable, but at the end of the book his call to action is for government assistance to the poor and for Christians to remain within theological orthodoxy.

Post-Trump Administration, we’ll see if U.S. Christians come to heed his message.