Tim Alberta begins his book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory with a personal story about the evangelical church in the Trump era. Increasingly angry at its own leaders and fellow members for even minor deviations from political orthodoxy, radical church members even berated Alberta at his father’s funeral.
Right wing Christians were always a cantankerous bunch. But since the election of Trump in 2016, and especially since the start of the pandemic in 2020, they’ve gotten much worse. They’ve fallen deeply into Trump inspired conspiracy theory. And they attack even fellow right-wing Christians like Mike Pence – and even their own right-wing pastors – as ‘woke,’ far left radicals.
Alberta thinks the Religious Right is tearing itself apart. It has jettisoned even its core religious beliefs, falling into more of a warped Trump cult than a religious community. It believes whatever Trump and the far right media circuit say on any given day.
As I read Alberta’s book, I realized I’ve seen things like this in left activist groups. And I want to dwell on that for a bit. I’m hardly the first person to draw a comparison between leftists and evangelicals. And the comparison is usually a trite and uninteresting one.
I’ll see if I can draw it in a more useful way.
Post-2020 Activism
The pandemic did a real number on social dynamics in activism. And that has come out in some really weird ways.
On the left, I see it most often in ‘political’ conflicts that, at the core, aren’t really political. One 2020s era activist group in my area tore itself apart with online bickering over racial justice. But the real dynamic seemed to involve a small core of members who were burned out and had untreated mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic.
And then there’s a different group where I used to be an elected leader. A series of conflicts popped up in 2022 and 2023 with a thin political veneer, at best. One conflict between a few group members and a local lone wolf activist nearly derailed the org. And even as things stand, it sparked several loud resignations. Echoes of the conflict remain to this today. In one of the weirder things I’ve seen in local activism, people continue wearing masks to meetings into late 2024, but for reasons I read as related more to social anxiety and psychological safety than to Covid.
So, yeah. It’s not just the Religious Right. The pandemic did a number on the mental health of people all over the political spectrum.
Why It’s Happening
Alberta tells a story about why this is happening. According to that story, Trump built on the prior politicization of the Christian religion by people like Jerry Falwell. This built tension between the political and religious aspects of the Religious Right. And then the Covid pandemic made the tension worse. But, at the core, it’s a story about the opportunism of people like Falwell and Trump.
Maybe that story works for the Christian Right, though, even there, I suspect it has its limits. But the story clearly doesn’t work for the version we find on the left. I think the version on the left is a series of responses to broader cultural phenomena, with Covid acting as the major catalyst.
And, at least for the left, it all manifests in the form of social anxiety, a retreat into the online world, and political engagement that’s largely limited to cultural politics.
Here’s one thing about left activists. As a group, much like the Religious Right, we’ve always been a cantankerous bunch. Leftists have been prone to conspiracy theories and bad political reasoning for decades.
But something changed over the course of 2020 and 2021. Our own leftist institutions and social systems of support broke down. And it put many leftists in a bad place. Plus, leftist orgs always lose members during times of Democratic power. Biden’s time in office cost the left in 2021, just as Obama cost the left in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
How to Fix It?
These things came together in a bad way for the left. And I don’t know how to fix it. It’s left me thinking about how I can still be a productive leftist.
In short, I don’t know how to pull people out of social anxiety and its weird manifestations in cultural politics. I don’t know how to get people to move out of alt-kid, counterculture activism and into building a coalition of workers and tenants.
But I do know that it’s what the left needs to do.
