Phil Christman explains Why Christians Should Be Leftists by pointing up The Sermon on the Mount, which begins with the Beatitudes: love, compassion, and selflessness are called for. “He urges all Christians,” as The Christian Century’s reviewer writes,to forge “a society that lifts and protects the wretched of the earth.” His profession “is essential to our current cultural and political landscape,” The Presbyterian Outlook declares.
Christman “advocates for abandoning ’the old covenant between Christians and conservatism,” Publishers Weekly reports, “and adopting leftist values closer to the ones Jesus espoused.” Of the book, Sojourners reckons, “it’s a testimony” in which the author calls Christians “to join leftists in a fight for a world where capital and violence don’t have outsized control in our societies.” Front Porch Republic sees “faithful Christianity” as being “leftist by necessity.”
One of the book’s “surprising traits”—The Christian Century again—“is that it’s not particularly polemical. Christman is generous, open-handed, exploratory. He has not simply traded one fundamentalism for another. … There is no hint of dogmatism here, just hard-won conviction.” It’s as Amos Wollen affirms in his substack.com blog, “The book is funny, but it is also brimming with a rare sort of moral earnestness.”
Why Christians Should Be Leftists
By Phil Christman
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2025