Introduction
The political Left is a Christian heresy. From Rousseau to Nietzsche and from Darwin to Marx and all of their cultural and political descendants, one of the common elements between them all is a disingenuous and deceptive assumption of certain Christian principles or ideals while jettisoning the unifying fabric of the whole. This goes back to the Garden of Eden, when the serpent attempted the first “leftist framing” – “then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). It was full of half-truths, or better: the Devil took the shell of truth and replaced the kernel. In other words, “leftist framing” is all Mormon. Mormonism, like all heresies, steals Biblical words and concepts, redefines them, and then tries to pass them off as the genuine article.
Rousseau did this when he claimed that people were basically good, blamed human society for social ills, and then pretended to be able to build a better, freer society. Darwin did it when he claimed that everything evolved over millions of years from single cell organisms, and ta-da! complex organization and function emerged from simplicity, chaos, and mutation, while pretending that this understanding would produce technological and scientific advance. And Marx did the same, pretending to reject Christianity, while assuming certain standards of Christian morality and justice. Nietzsche perhaps came the closest to actually embracing the kind of nihilism that fully rejects Christianity but even he pulled the punch, glorifying strength, courage, nobility, and heroism, even while rejecting the transcendent standard that would give those virtues their, well, virtue.
A Little Help from Dabney
And the same thing is true of modern leftist framing. Using Marxist categories of oppressor and oppressed, and systems of power and hegemony, the leftist framework recasts the ultimate struggle as racial and sexual, blaming white male Christendom for patriarchal oppression (and basically all the evil in the world, from the crusades to slavery) and seeks to “empower” and “liberate” so-called racial and sexual minorities. R.L. Dabney called this in the late 19th century with the rise of so called “first wave” feminism and “women’s rights,” beginning with the hard push for the right to vote. Dabney recognized that the whole set up was a revolutionary attack on Christianity despite their redefinition of terms:
“We must then make up our minds in accepting Women’s Rights to surrender our Bibles, and have an atheistic Government. And especially must we expect to have, presiding over every home and rearing every group of future citizens, that most abhorrent of all phenomena, an infidel woman; for of course that sex, having received the precious boon of their enfranchisement only by means of the overthrow of the Bible, must be foremost in trampling upon this their old oppressor and enemy. Its restoration to authority is necessarily their “re-enslavement,” to speak the language of their party.”
Dabney pointed out that this “language of their party” weaponized the whole notion of “rights” and “equality” and “liberty.” He acknowledged that the founders of America certainly did affirm a kind of universal rights and equality for all men and women, but “when our wise fathers said that liberty is an inalienable, natural right, they meant by each one’s liberty the privilege to do such things as he, with his particular relations, ought to have a moral title to do; the particular things having righteous, natural limitations in every case, and much narrower limits in some cases than in others.”
And so here is the “leftist framing” of so-called first wave feminism. It takes a word, a concept and guts it of its Biblical definition, replaces those guts with foreign, even contradictory notions, and then, playing off the definitional ambiguity, swings that Frankenstein concept around like a cat-o-nine-tails, cowing reasonable Christian people with the accusation that they are “misogynists” and “fascists,” haters of all women and liberty.
But as Dabney labors to demonstrate it is not the “women’s rights” radicals that love and honor women. They are actually the misogynists. They are the true haters of women and liberty. He writes, “this movement on the part of these women is as suicidal as it is mischievous. Its certain result will be the re-enslavement of women, not under the Scriptural bonds of marriage, but under the yoke of literal corporeal force. Instead of being what the Bible makes her, one with her husband, queen of his home, reigning with the gentle scepter of love over her modest, secluded domain, and in its pure and sacred retirement performing the noblest work done on this earth, that of molding infant minds to honor and piety, she will reappear from this ill-starred competition defeated and despised, tolerated only to satiate the passion, to amuse the idleness, to do the drudgery, and to receive the curses and blows of her barbarized masters.”
And we have done this to our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters.
The Modern Leftist Gaze & the Fear of God
And so it is the same down to the present day. From the false accusations of misogyny, the radicals graduated to accusations of “racism” and “homophobia” and “antisemitism” and so on. But the reason why the accusations have generally worked is because Christians and good-hearted folks knew that there was a real sin called hating women, spiteful treatment of people because of their race or religion, or treating even evil sinners with malice. But when the revolutionaries have been weaponizing Christian concepts for so long it can become tempting to become so fed up with it that you come to think of the true concepts as the “leftist framing.”
This is clearly happening as recently I kicked a small bee’s nest when I affirmed that while leftists have tried to weaponize “homophobia,” it is nevertheless a sin to treat a homosexual with spite and malice. In a biblically just society, homosexuality would be suppressed and criminalized by law. That is not homophobic. It is not homophobic to affirm the sinfulness of homosexuality, and the fact that unrepentant homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. But the reason why that largely false accusation has been weaponized to some extent in our formerly Christian land is because everyone knows that the Bible requires a basic level of civility be extended to all people, even those who need to be firmly restrained in their evil lusts.
It is absolutely necessary for Christians to have the kind of thick skin and fear of God that doesn’t care about the leftist gaze, the guilt-shaming of the left that has no actual concern for women, different races, much less true social or criminal justice. But in our determination to not care what they think, we must absolutely care what God thinks. We must care what the Word of God says, and we must not allow the gaze of the bitter right or the noticing of the malicious right to matter to us either. Just because the left has used fake sins to create a Pharisaical cancel culture, does not mean that when real sins arise and are confronted biblically that anyone has succumbed to cancel culture and leftist framing. It is not cancel culture to discipline a church member for true malice or spite. And just because they have also weaponized the concept of “hate,” doesn’t mean there isn’t a sinful form of it.
Conclusion
When Paul confronted Peter for preferring his own people and parted ways with Barnabas for preferring his nephew, that was not a turf war or cancel culture or succumbing to leftist framing. It was a faithful man confronting serious theological and strategic error. And the Church was better for it. But there were no doubt many who saw Paul’s hardline stance as “brother wars” and “infighting” and “unnecessary division.”
Barnabas was known as the “son of encouragement” and no doubt many thought that Paul was being overly zealous, perhaps becoming a bit jealous of Barnabas’s rising influence in the fledgling Christian movement. And why couldn’t Paul just pull Peter aside after the fellowship meal privately? Why did he have to confront Peter in front of everyone? Talk about divisive. Talk about cancel culture. No, not really.
Sometimes faithfulness doesn’t care what it looks like. Sometimes faithfulness simply speaks the truth and lets the pieces fall where they may. The truth is the only way to actually reject the leftist framing. It is to insist that God’s Word is the standard, regardless of how the left has weaponized it, regardless of how offended and exasperated the right is by the left. We serve the Lord God, not the petty grievances of political factions. And of course that may mean that we’re all Christofascists and homophobes and racists, and we must not care in the least about such false accusations, provided the accusations are completely false.
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