Raymond de Souza: Elizabeth May and the rise of messianic politics
The world needs saving, but apparently Jesus won’t do it. According to the Liberals and now the Greens, progressive politics will
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Joseph Brean explored in last Saturday’s National Post the role of religion in our current political moment. That was prompted in part by Elizabeth May’s confession in a political interview that Jesus Christ is her “personal hero,” an admission for which she immediately added “sorry.” She had answered too “quickly and honestly.”
My colleague Matt Gurney wrote about the political problems with the Green party’s understanding of tolerance, which tolerates every green view except the environmentalism motivated by explicit Christian faith.
I wrote elsewhere about the theological problems with the May interview.
But there is another important dimension to May’s discussion of her faith and her politics. It’s an example of the rise of messianic politics on the left. The world needs saving, but Jesus won’t do it. Progressive politics will.
The Green party … tolerates every green view except the environmentalism motivated by explicit Christian faith
As is well known, May is serious about her faith. So serious that she was preparing to be an Anglican priest before she left divinity school for politics. Why did May leave her studies for ordination to enter politics?
“I have to save the world,” she said.
Even granting the rhetorical looseness of the interview in question, saving the world is an ambitious goal for politics. Ancient wisdom — philosophical rather than strictly theological — observed that it is hard for something to fix itself, to fix something from the inside. It’s usually the case that something external is necessary, like a doctor or a mechanic. So saving the world may require something otherworldly, hence supernatural or transcendent.
Saving the world is an ambitious goal for politics
May likely regards mankind as external to the environment that needs saving, but at the same time it is mankind that is the threat. So saving the environment is about saving ourselves from ourselves, which poses logical, not only political, challenges. May’s confession is that we need politics to change ourselves. It is the progressive creed that it can be done, and one that carries within it the messianic impulse. And all messianic politics runs the risk of being intolerant, or much worse, to those who do not share the faith.
The late American senator and belletrist Daniel Patrick Moynihan notably observed that conservatives recognize that “culture, not politics, determines the success of a society,” while liberals believe “politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
That was decades ago, but the belief that progressive politics can save culture (and thus save the world) is more pointed now. Religion may have a lesser place in politics, but messianism is on the rise.
You will recall the soaring rhetoric of Barack Obama’s inspiring campaign for president in 2008.
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time,” Obama said on the stump. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
We are the ones we have been waiting for. Obama took it from a 2006 collection by Alice Walker published under that name, a phrase taken in turn from the poet June Jordan. Walker’s publisher described her essays as “drawing equally upon (her) spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions,” which is the mixing of religion and politics that the left is supposedly against.
“It is the best of times … when we consider how much suffering human beings have endured, in previous millennia, without a clue to its cause,” wrote Walker. “Because we can now see into every crevice of the globe and because we are free to explore previously unexplored crevices in our own hearts and minds, it is inevitable that everything we have needed to comprehend in order to survive, everything we have needed to understand in the most basic of ways, will be illuminated now.”
Messianic politics is impatient. It is not interested in waiting for anyone. The messiah must come now
This age of illumination may enable us to see into heretofore unexplored crevices of the globe, but it is quite a conceit that there are unexplored crevices of the human mind and heart. Sophocles and Dante got there long before Alice Walker.
It is the messiah who holds the keys to unlock the human mystery, to proposing the definitive and necessary conversion of mind and heart. That is why, between Sophocles and Dante, John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7:19)
Messianic politics is impatient. It is not interested in waiting for anyone. The messiah must come now and, conveniently, he is already here, for we are the ones we have been waiting for.
The progressive moralizing — even moral superiority — of the governing Liberals on a host of issues, including the environment, is of a piece with the political messianism that captured the energies of Elizabeth May.
Religion may not have a prominent place in Canadian politics, but it does not mean that the messiah is not welcome. There are many candidates eager to present themselves for the role.
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