Christianity: Left or Right?

 It’s hard to escape politics at the moment.

I’ve found myself wondering about left and right. What do those categories mean? Are they useful?  

Maybe we might compare the conservative (right?) and the progressive (left?). Does the Christian faith line up with either?

Christians are, in a way, fundamentally conservative. They receive creation as a gift to be preserved. We don’t make or define ourselves. What we have we receive. We conform to the reality which the Creator confers on us. Christianity is in a sense a Tradition to which we are to be loyal and which we are to hand on.

But Christians also think we world has gone radically wrong. They think change – a revolution – is needed. We are not for conserving this world order as it is. We are for the lifting up of the humble poor and for the over-turning of the tables of the money changers. Jesus has already brough in a New Creation. There is a new power at work in the world, new life, transformation. Our prayer is that earth might be more like heaven. We are progressing to an end. There is an arc to history which ends with the Kingdom come in all its fullness.

Christianity, then, is both profoundly conservative and radically progressive.