There is no shortage of people rationalizing how Jesus was on their political side, and most often, specifically leftist, socialist, or progressive. I read & watched dozens of them, to prepare for this.
There are just as many assertions that Jesus was specifically NOT conservative, or at least not the way conservatives are today. I dove into those as well.
Moral Foundations Theory
To venture any answer to this question, we must have an understanding of what makes a person fall to the left or right. I've explored that here, using Moral Foundations Theory to explain these things. If you're not familiar, start there.
The question of whether what constitutes leftism/progressivism, versus conservatism, today, has any semblance of leftism or rightism during other eras such as 1st Century Roman Iudæa, quickly melts away when we study political ideologies from the perspective of morals. Indeed, there are notable differences between a progressive and a socialist, and from the perspective of socialists they share little in common, politically. It's conservatives who group them together as political adversaries.
Yet a real distinction emerges in MFT, one which surely straddles many diverse views, but those views then typically gravitate into tighter clusters in the context of oppositional politics, such as presidential politics. This is where moral left and moral right emerge, and in this context progressivism falls on the left even though socialists consider them adversaries.
Morals are not falsifiable -- which explains how people can come to hold such strong convictions in their value system on either side, and how they can argue incessantly and get nowhere. If these were easily falsifiable things, like, oh I don't know, the laws of physics, humans would have solved them by now. By & large, there would only be one right answer, and we wouldn't expend so much energy trying to establish which one was correct.
Assuming that there is a correct one. Which we can't say for certain. Because they aren't falsifiable.
They're judgment calls. They're value systems. We prescribe them to the world as purportedly optimized strategies for navigating the tricky & complex messiness that is human interaction. Economics, governance, justice, goodness, all these things are very important to most of us but we just can't seem to agree on what the best strategy is.
But once we recognize that politics and culture are all predicated on these (semi-) shared value systems, these morals, we can not only understand politics, our opponents, and even ourselves much better, but we can understand the peoples separated from us by un-traversable distances of time.
We can identify and profile Jesus' political proclivities by studying his morality.
So again, if you're unfamiliar, start with my treatment of Moral Foundations. It's eye-opening and tremendously valuable, and I don't have time to expound on it much here.
I'm going to use Moral Foundations as a framework to evaluate all of Jesus' moral statements in the Bible. I cataloged & categorized all of them, to find over 200 (not counting repeats) of the following:
Moral statements
Moral actions
Conspicuous absence of moral statements or actions
Approval or reproach of other moral statements or actions
The Courage to Answer the Question
I can tell you I approached this project with as much sincerity, lucidity and willingness to come to an answer that surprised and defied my preconceptions, as I think anyone could manage. I cannot tell you I took a neutral, impartial or objective approach, because that's not possible. It's certainly not possible to understand the role morals play in politics, why these things are beneficial for humans at individual, community and societal scales, and then remain uninterested and impartial. I have a horse in the race.
It will surprise no one to announce that I am right-wing.
I'm intimately aware of the implications, what it would mean for myself, to come to any of the possible conclusions (left, right, neither, or both). It would be nice to feel validated. That my values were correct all along. It would be troubling to find myself not only missing my Lord's values and instructions, but even opposing them.
I think we all feel that way, even those less vested by not believing Jesus is Lord, is Alive, but was a man, now gone. I'm going to approach this as though he was just a man.
So, you may have already skimmed just to find the answer. Yes or no. Right or left. Do I have an answer? Do I have the courage to give it rather than waffle or cop out?
Jesus demonstrated several clear and undeniable leftist characteristics. He also chastised several conservative characteristics.
I don't believe this makes him leftist. Nor progressive, nor socialist. But also, definitely not conservative, in the sense of being a strict traditionalist.
I believe the answer is He is neither right nor left, but served as ambassador to the Kingdom of Heaven. I believe he transcends ideologies because his purposes are for eternal things.
And I also believe this doesn't automatically mean you should be as He is, and be neither left nor right. I don't believe it's feasible to understand values and politics and not develop an ideology. As a right-winger I obviously believe it's better than leftism. But hey, I could be wrong of course.
But while we could myopically just seek to use Jesus' morality to validate our own ideologies, I believe just the examination process here illuminates an exceptional amount about what it means for us to be these things.
So I believe neither is not a cop-out answer. I've heard & read cop-out answers. I've been told by a dozen different pastors that we are called to transcend the filthy, broken and corrupt system of politics, which is great, but vague. Those answers give no substantiation of the problem of ideologies, and certainly do not articulate a tangible and actionable alternative. I don't believe neither means abstention.
I believe the examination process here brings good things for everyone.
I hope your curiosity remains. I hope you didn't look for the bottom line just to feel politically vindicated or find cause to sneer at someone else's motivated cognition. I hope you'll continue with me.
Because my answer above? It's not what you think.
Justice
This is a broad topic, which most of my writing has been comprised of so far. There are two main components of justice, in terms of political morals. There is concern for things being fair. And there is concern for law & order, particularly upholding criminal justice and preventing society from falling into depravity.
It often seems like fairness is the concern of the left, and criminal justice the concern of the right, but this is not quite the case. Jon Haidt's studies showed clearly that everyone cares about justice. We don't all agree on what is just, but we all care.
The God of the Bible makes it abundantly care that He cares a lot about injustice. He has great contempt for injustice, particularly in the form of corruption, exploitation and suppression of the poor and vulnerable. He condemns cheating with wicked scales and deceptive weights.
These injustices are things left & right share as a concern. That defies perception, particularly on the left, but it's true.
Jesus also finds injustice reprehensible. But I can't say his words and actions demonstrate a marked characteristic of the kind of veneration for upholding criminal justice that we often see in conservative culture. That's not to say he doesn't care; he does. But if we were to build the case that Jesus today would be a "law & order conservative," right off the bat with our first examination we'd have a problem.
Now that by no means indicates that Christ forsakes criminal justice, as some leftists have. And a notable characteristic of leftist thought is something along the lines of, the criminal class of society are actually victims because an overly-punitive system has failed them.
Such sentiments are not characteristic of Jesus' moral statements or actions around criminal justice. We arguably have one exception, and it's big: the Pericope Adulterae.
A couple problems lie in the way, for us to construe that to a leftist criminal-as-victim viewpoint. The passage contains a strong allusion to the commandment not to bear false witness: writing in the ground is a symbolic allusion to God's finger writing commandments on stone tablets (which is ostensibly the mechanism to entice the Pharisees to relent). The text does not explicitly say the woman was innocent of the charges. But neither does Jesus attribute her purported missteps to her accusers or anyone else. Additionally he implores her to sin no more. So this passage is complicated at best, for leftism. And it's the only statement, action, approval or lack thereof that could be construed for a leftist view.
It's also missing in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John 🤔
But by & large, we cannot accurately characterize Jesus' justice moralizing with either the criminal-as-victim leftist proclivity, nor the law-and-order-to-prevent-social-decay view on the right.
What Jesus was particularly preoccupied with, however, was Mercy & Grace.
Mercy & Grace
This is a spoiler for my first writing, but mercy & grace are violations of justice. They are the opposite of justice. So, does that mean that Jesus didn't care about Justice? We established above that he did. Did he only care about the injustices of his apparent political opponents, the Pharisees?
We have several significant items to build the case that he did care about justice. We have this significant passage that binds old & new testaments together theologically:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."
We have the fact that Jesus talked more about hell than heaven. He gave many allusions to a day of judgment, a sort of universal righting of wrongs:
"But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken."
And he implored several times for people to treat each other justly. Not just kindly or compassionate, but justly.
And of course as The Living Word, who was God from the beginning, we have an abundance of concern for justice, balanced scales, and reciprocity in the Law and the Prophets, words that He spoke from the beginning before he came to be born of a woman. It takes some special kind of denial to not see Jesus unquestionably cared about Justice.
But the red letters of his word demonstrate an even greater concern for mercy and grace. He wouldn't be the Messiah if he didn't have a particular focus on forgiveness.
So, neither political side can accurately lay claim to a noteworthy political distinction on mercy, grace or forgiveness. I used to believe conservatives had the edge. But it's not a hallmark of right-wing morality. It's a hallmark of Christ's morality, which in turn has predicated the morality for Christians all along the political spectrum.
A spectrum he truly transcends in Justice, our first category. If you took a 5-channel mixing board and dialed up the moral foundations of your political persuasions, you would invariably dial your Justice morality up high. On the left, on the right.
And Jesus would as well. But not for the rightist concern for law & order. And not for the leftist concern for fairness.
Fairness
A careful study of the Beatitudes reveal the thesis is absolutely NOT about correcting unfairness, but rather about accepting your place in life no matter the circumstance. Jesus was not a social justice warrior advocating for greater fairness in society. To the contrary, in The Sermon On The Mount he takes the highest moral arguments of the day and implores his hearer to go further, rhetorically, to illustrate how those moral standards fall egregiously short.
"The point is not to establish an impossible moral standard. The point is that even a sufficient moral standard is itself impossible to achieve. And that the highest moral codes of the day were half what might be deemed sufficient.
The most fervent religious pursuits for righteousness don't just fall short: they idealize and venerate a moral standard that itself falls short, and then they still can't even abide by a lower standard."
So although Jesus was quick to call out the hypocrisies and injustices of society, and the left are correct to see that as left-analog, his demonstrative regard for fairness serves as a major rebuke for leftism. Careful analysis of one passage illuminates:
"13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” 14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”
15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”"
Mosaic Law established that the firstborn son would receive two-thirds inheritance. This can scarcely be argued to be fair. I suppose it could be argued that firstborn children assist the household for a longer duration and therefore deserve a larger portion, and so arguably an equal division would be less than fair. But at any rate, advocacy for modifying Mosaic Law to be more fair and for equal division of inheritance was a social movement of the day, like the others that did not get endorsement in The Sermon On The Mount. The person in the crowd here is undoubtedly a second-born son, and the moral predicate for his request here is a progressive one.
Don't miss what Jesus says to the crowd. Watch out for greed! Speaking to the heart and motive behind the progressive advocacy, Christ tacitly rebukes the heart and motive of a large portion of socialism and progressivism.
We often associate greed with rich people, but here we see it expressed by someone lacking, or at least perceiving themselves so. Greed is highly associated with capitalism, no more famously than by Gordon Gekko. But Envy is widely cited throughout history to be the heart of socialism. The Koine Greek word used in Luke here is pleonexias which is probably best translated as covetousness.
So in all the ways he demonstrated his concern for justice, for fairness, for upholding law & order, Christ rebuked upholding man-made tradition at the expense of justice for the needy and vulnerable. And here above he also rebuked the very spirit of leftism. He did not demonstrate the left's elevated concern for fairness, nor the right's elevated concern for law & order.
He truly transcends political morality in our first category of Moral Foundations Theory.
But we're not done. In our next installment, progressives are going to score some points.