An honest scorecard view so far, would look like this:
1. Fairness: N/A
2. Criminal Justice: Somewhat Left
3. Justice, Mercy & Grace: N/A
4. Harm Reduction Professed: Left
5. Harm Reduction Lived: Right
6. Peace: N/A
7. Loyalty: Both
Total: Left 2.5, Right 2, N/A 3
As I pointed out previously, these categories are not equal. Some should count more than others.
But if Harm Reduction is indisputably at the top, that -- combined with Christ's living out and rewarding the good fruits of loyalty -- may arguably lead him to rebuke the progressive tendency to profess but not live out harm reduction & charity.
Arguably this could be, Left 1.5, Right 2, N/A 3. And his lack of explicit regard for criminal justice is on shaky ground.
Well I wish I could tell you the tables will turn.
But once again in these final categories, we see Christ modeling 1) a conspicuous absence of endorsement for -- and explicit rebuke against -- the excesses of these right-wing moralities, 2) demonstration and endorsement of reasonable and humble application of these right-wing moralities, and 3) direct violations of pronounced leftist morals.
In other words, he is once again congruent with the left on rebuking the sins of excessive RW behaviors, but otherwise a venerable practitioner of said RW behaviors, and demonstrably not leftist.
Such an ambiguous & orthogonal stance may be best reflected in this next section, where the bifurcated behavior is so undeniably on display.
Purity & Sanctity
What I mean by the sentence above is, probably the most striking contrast by far in my study of Christ's morality, is this: his strongest rebukes against Pharisaic religiosity highlighted a reprehensibly misplaced preoccupation with ritual and bodily purity, and yet his most severe implorations ostensibly called for an unattainable standard of purity.
Observe:
And:
What shall our takeaway be? His critics pointed out he & his disciples didn't wash their hands before they ate; they called him a glutton and a drunk; didn't fast; he didn't mind being touched by sinners. For the cultural mores of the day in pursuit of purity, these were major violations.
And yet, he says no one has ever been greater than the ascetic, John the Baptist. He pronounced woes on cities that don't repent. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. He was tempted for 40 days in the desert and resisted.
Anyone with an answer that doesn't address this great polarity, doesn't have an answer.
But why would Christ care about purity? It's not as intrinsically self-apparent as justice or preventing human suffering. But a review of the morality of purity in general shows it as a means to an end: purity encourages restraint, and restraint prevents misery.
The greatest example is single motherhood: there is no larger correlation to poverty. Not race. Not education.
A site gathering single mother statistics reports, “The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2018 was 34%, nearly five times more than the rate (6%) for married-couple families. 16 Among children living with mother only, 40% lived in poverty. In contrast, only 12% of children in two parent families were counted as poor.”
So moralizing sexual purity is a means to abate the suffering of our greatest driver of poverty. Just as mores around food purity were means to abate communicable disease. It's a moral category that tends to not be obvious for leftists & socialists.
But although it has practical bearing on society, I'm loathe to just assign it mere pragmatism in Christ's overall morality, much less make it germane to any political proclivities. So, pursuant to our central question of whether Christ was a leftist socialist, we must examine, did he demonstrate any awareness or convictions on notions of purity?
Here we have a relative lack of recorded instances of him matching or exceeding the purity mores of the religious leaders of the day. Jesus was not a leading ascetic of the day -- aside from the peerless 40-day temptation, which evidently was necessary and germane for theological reasons rather than a model for praxis.
Combine this absence with the itemized critiques of the Pharisees above, and we have a strong case Jesus of Nazareth was no right-wing religious extremist.
Indeed, his most scathing rebukes of hypocrisy tended to center on Pharisaical displays of purity:
Given the historical context, this attitude is pretty strongly leftist. That's not by any means to say his values on purity would be leftist today. Here above we can see most of his focus on the ills of excessive moralizing is about food purity rather than sexual purity.
This is also not to say that rightists or conservatives universally demonstrate excessive religiosity around bodily or sexual purity. Even his two most prominently known encounters -- the Pericope Adulterae & the Samaritan woman at the well -- do not provide even tacit license for promiscuity. In both cases, the grace & compassion, and the rebuke of the rigid authorities, need not be coupled with sexual license. Though sexual license is an exceptionally common assertion, from theologians & scholars to every day humans throughout the centuries around the globe, it's a false dichotomy to contend that his rebuke of the evidently lying & exploiting Pharisees indicates that Christ appeases adultery, much less endorses it.
Above we see passages condemning sexual immorality as defiling a person, and although I contend his statement to pluck out your own eye to keep from sexual sin is rhetorical, by no means can that passage be twisted or shaped into any kind of sexual license. If merely looking at a woman lustfully is adultery, you can make a case that grace is the only possible path out of condemnation, yes. But you cannot make a case that grace enables indulgence.
Lastly, his contentions with the Pharisees over these purity-pertinent matters aligns with his general rebukes of their excessive religiosity: he chastised a pretextual devotion to God at the expense of providing for parents, and balked at the idea that he should not heal someone because it constituted work on the Sabbath.
So chalk this one up to half leftist, half rightist, again. He makes no compromise on sexual purity, and no serious case could be made that he is or would be an ally of the sexual left. But he spoke out against excessive religiosity far more. Far more.
"Miscellaneous Moralities"
I'm saving Authority & Respect for last, to make a decisive point. As a reminder, the miscellaneous or "other" category of statements, actions or lack thereof that did not suitably fall within Haidt's MFT categories, itself made up the fourth most numerous category:
Harm Reduction - 67 instances
Authority & Respect - 34 instances
Justice - 32 instances
"Other" - 31 instances
Loyalty - 20 instances
Purity - 19 instances
Of course this doesn't serve the exploration of his ideological leanings much, except to just reaffirm and exemplify how he defies our inexorable ideological tendencies today. So I'm not going to expound on what this means as much, here, but rather just highlight a few examples to substantiate the reality.
Early on in his ministry, he picked up the central focus of John the Baptist's ministry: repentance. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." He told his followers to let their light shine.
He came to fulfill the law rather than abolish it -- the eternal fulcrum point in the debate between the utility and/or applicability of the law in a Christ follower's devotion, and doctrines of grace. Arguably a tacit honoring of tradition, yet in contrast we see some forsaking of tradition.
Don't cast your pearls to swine. Several passages that apparently implore some degree of not fully indulging in normal society. Let's take a moment to appreciate one with significant gravity: the wide gate leads to destruction, and only a few enter the narrow gate to life.
We have dozens of passages imploring us to raise our devotion to God to the fullest extent possible, and even a passage that prioritizing hospitable responsibilities is a lesser pursuit.
The gospel of John in general heavily moralizes faith and love.
This is still just a small sampling of the wide variance of this category-defying collection. But two small subcategories do stand out in a noteworthy way.
We have 5 passages that endorse some level of practicality & conscientiousness, such as the evidently pro-investment Parable of the Ten Minas, or Matthew 13:12, or a lengthy collection of vigilance in Luke 13:35-48.
And we have another handful of passages that entail what I can only describe as multipluralism, but not multiculturalism. What I mean by that is, that Christ most certainly welcomed others in to the Kingdom of God. But he did not forsake or compromise his own morality to do so. This is undeniable. He did not adopt a relativistic, post-modern ethic. He did not preoccupy himself with matters of cultural assimilation or segregation.
He simply made clear the Kingdom of God is open to all who wish to enter.
This is evident from his Parable of the Wedding Feast, as well as his statement equating fellow devotees with family. It's also evident in the unusual dynamic of his ministry, in that it was financially supported by women. We have another major theologically important passage, which I'll get to in a bit. And we have the observed fact that all of the people whose faith he commended were gentiles.
I find this multipluralist-but-not-multiculturalist distinction highly relevant to the tug-of-war over Jesus' politics. It is yet again absolutely true that Jesus did not participate in in-grouping activities that shrink the social circle, and he was loathe to exclude the gospel or the Kingdom from anyone. But it is also true that he did not embrace the self-forsaking rejection of local & institutional culture or mores, as modern leftists do.
His greatest commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might, would prevent him from doing so: Israel has a storied history of cultural intermarriage that invariably led to idolatry.
Respect & Authority
The thing that seemingly stands out the most amidst Jesus' 34 occasions handling of matters of Respect & Authority are the 17 times -- exactly half; imagine that -- he rebuked or chastised Pharisees, Sadducees or Scribes for hypocrisy.
So one thing Jesus did not model was submission to authority.
But wait.
Were Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes in actual positions of authority?
Tho we often think of them as such, the answer is no, not quite. Although they held a fair amount of influence and esteem, Pharisees and Sadducees were social movements proclaiming their particular ideological religious philosophies.
Neither Herod nor the tetrarchy of his sons were Pharisees or Sadducees. Certainly no Roman Governor was ever part of either group. And although they were evidently sympathetic toward Sadduccees, neither were any of the High Priests part of either group.
So what kind of authority exactly this the Pharisees and Sadducees have?
Both sat in the Sanhedrin, the council of elders. But they did not constitute either priestly or royal authority. Not merely by taking part in either group.
So conflating these groups with authority is a mistake, and therefore Christ's interactions with them is not a suitable context for evaluating his regard for authority. But before we dive deeper into the morality of authority, I'd like to take a moment to unpack the modern parallels held by these two groups because it's a tremendous witness to sociological systemic emergence.
By which I mean: what kind of social behavior that we see today is spurred on by factors that are generally constant across generations and cultures?
The Pharisees were basically the populists of the day and enjoyed broader support among the populace. The Sadducees were essentially elitist.
Sadducees supported Hellenization, which is the embrace of Greek culture, and which posed a significant threat to the traditions and culture held sacred by Israelites. They were fairly nihilistic and fatalistic. They did not believe in souls or afterlife, angels or spirits. Unsurprisingly, they also collected taxes and cooperated with Roman authorities.
A third sect existed, the ascetic and separatist Essenes. They called the Sadducees Manasseh, and the Pharisees Ephraim, and themselves the true Judah. They never had strong numbers and they never held strong influences, as third sects are wont to do. But although theories that Jesus was an Essene have long been popular, there is much more evidence that if he held solidarity with any of these groups, it was the Pharisees.
As evidenced by his extensive interaction with them -- the nascent discipline of Rabbinical Judaism frequently entailed robust debate -- although Christ chastised their sanctimoniousness repeatedly, his demonstrative morality and theology really did not diverge from the Pharisees much at all. And not only Jesus: the Apostle Paul, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and Gamaliel (son of the famous rabbi Hillel The Elder) were all Pharisees. Gamaliel was sympathetic toward Christians, and when Jesus answers the question, "what is the greatest commandment," he quotes Hillel (that's why modern interpretations put double quotes around it).
You can probably figure out who's who in conjunction with modern political groups. But the main thing here is, although they would most assuredly be offended by the prospect, the fact remains these groups did not hold authority over Jesus of Nazareth, rabbi from Galilee, much less the general populace.
So using Jesus rebuking Pharisees as a model to reject any obligation toward authority ain't gonna cut it.
Now, it is true that the influence, status and prestige the Pharisees and Sadducees had lent toward respect, and 1st Century Judea certainly venerated respect quite a bit.
And respect is a key aspect of right-wing morality, specifically this Authority-Respect combination we're talking about here. But disagreement was not -- IS not -- disrespect. Hearty debate is not disrespect.
Calling people out on their transgressions?
If that's disrespect, you might not wanna read the prophet Isaiah. Or any of the prophets, really.
Now God the Father is no respecter of persons. Nor should he be. But my point here is, Jesus need not make the argument that he's not disrespecting Pharisees because he's God incarnate. He doesn't need to. It was not a violation of 1st Century Judean respect, to chastise them. This is clear by the ample evidence we have in the gospels of Jesus responding to them trying to do the same toward him.
That does not mean we have license to opponents as vindictively as we wish. That kind of justification makes it far too easy to rationalize the worst transgressions. No one has illustrated this better than Noam Blum:
Watch out. It's a breeding ground for pride.
So if calling out hypocrisy doesn't make Jesus the Zach De La Rocha of his day, then what do the gospels tell us about the political shape of his regard for authority & respect?
Coming Up: the final installment
In this series, I've cited many more of his words, than his actions. And there is one action, above all, that he is known for, historically, academically, and secularly. Not willingly and deliberately stretching out his hands to take on the sins of the world. No, that, his greatest action -- THE Greatest Action That Has Ever Occurred -- is one the secular world tends not to dwell on, so much.
But it is the action that scholars say ultimately led to his crucifixion, that has been cited so frequently -- so reductively -- as proof of his political persuasions.
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