Politics and Testimonies
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Liberation theology
10 min read
The article discusses the intersection of Christianity and leftist politics, making liberation theology—a movement synthesizing Christian theology with socio-economic critique—directly relevant context for understanding Christman's religious-political framework
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Calvin University
12 min read
Christman attended Calvin College, a Reformed Christian institution that shaped his theological development. Understanding its Dutch Reformed tradition and educational philosophy provides crucial context for his spiritual journey
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Das Kapital
14 min read
The article directly references Marx's Das Kapital as what Christman considers 'the most searching and important statement on what we call capitalism.' Understanding this foundational text illuminates the economic arguments being discussed
“Testifying.” That is the title of Phil Christman’s first chapter, but it might have been a more apt title for the book as a whole. Christman purports to explain Why Christians Should Be Leftists. Judged against that objective, the book comes up short. Taken as a personal testimonial, though, the book has more to recommend it—and a lot that may resonate with Latter-day Saint experience.
Christman tells how he grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home and later attended Calvin College. Although struggling to keep and live the faith, he was afflicted with doubts. Why did God not speak to him, Phil Christman, in the ways he seemed to speak to other people? “When I prayed, I could not banish from my mind the fear that I was simply talking to myself,” he recalls. And he had the nagging fear that “God didn’t love me.”
Some LDS readers—or, I can say for certain, at least one—will identify with such struggles.
And then, a bit like Martin Luther (and, again, like some LDS inquirers), Christman was blessed with an angst-relieving “epiphany,” as he calls it. With two epiphanies, actually, or perhaps one epiphany with two components.
The first component was a sort of intuitive spiritual realization of the Second Great Commandment. One afternoon, while reading scriptures with a group of college classmates, Christman was inwardly beset with his usual doubts; he was also feeling forlorn because of a romantic breakup. And then, all of a sudden, “a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which—this is as close as I can get to summarizing it—each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting.” Christman suddenly knew that “no second spent with them or with any person could be anything other than a gift.” And he experienced “something more than happy”; he felt “the possibility of universal solidarity” with the rest of humanity.
Among the thousands of LDS accounts that I have heard in which people tell how they “gained a testimony,” I have not heard anyone put it in exactly this way. But some of the testimonies are at least in this vicinity.
For Christman, the rush of spiritual insight did not end with this experience of love and solidarity; there was a political component as
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