My parents were radical leftists, and my mother is still alive and still somewhere to the left politically. Their level of involvement in politics and social issues varied, but it was always clear to me what they believed about human society and that they believed it with no hesitation or apology. Now that I have read about some of the history of their generation, it appears to me that the strongest shapers of their views might have been disillusionment with the growing conservatism of the mainstream labor movement and the disinclination of some leftists to follow the course of making a wartime ally, the Soviet Union, into a post-war enemy.
     My family went to church together until about my tenth birthday, but my turning to evangelical Christianity six years later was to a great extent an attempt to assert an identity for myself separate from my family and its values.
     The evangelical Christians that I started to associate with were quite conservative politically, and the more I moved around in evangelical circles the more apparent it became that the combination of evangelical faith and conservative politics was taken for granted. The people I was worshipping with and learning about faith in Christ from regarded support of the U.S. government�s Cold War policies as a close ally of Christian faith�though sometimes with the qualification that the Cold War policies sometimes did not go far enough. They regarded nearly any hint of socialism as a manifestation of a dangerously evil opponent of true faith and any thought of sympathy for convicted criminals as wrong.
     As far as I remember it now, it never occurred to me to agree with the politics of my Christian friends. My upbringing took the upper hand, and my attempt to understand the relation between my Christian faith and everything that looked true to me politically (because I had been raised on it) took the form, after a couple years, of finding an alliance between faith and less conservative political views and of finding how evangelical faith might shape an understanding of society and government different from that of my conservative friends and teachers.
     Two books were essential in this change. Richard Pierard�s The Unequal Yoke displayed, in order to question it, the assumption that evangelical faith and conservative politics belong together. Guy Hershberger�s War, Peace, and Nonresistance gave me ammunition in my efforts to reject the idea that pacifists are fools, which is what a couple evangelical teachers had explicitly said, and showed me that traditions of dissent against government and of pacifism overlap with traditions of evangelical faith and that this combination is embodied in particular communities of faith. These two books made it possible for me to turn a corner, so to speak, toward a more believable faith.
     Various forms of alliance between evangelical faith and leftist politics have emerged or become more prominent in the years since then. They have varying degrees of agreement with each other and of alliance with other attempts to understand Christian faith as a challenge to the political, social, and military status quo rather than as a prop for conservatism. I have learned much from many.
     I'll be sticking pages on this website that represent the continuation of those efforts of years ago to see some positive connection between new-found faith and what I had learned from my parents, to see how an understanding of society and government can be shaped by evangelical faith, that is, by the Bible. I can handle biblical scholarship, but I'm trying also to work in the direction of spirituality, to work on, that is, how Christian faith informs a view of and stance toward government and how Christian spirituality might be embodied in the world we live in. This is, I hope, not individualistic, but for the church, since an essential aspect of the embodiment of spirituality is a community of faith that is deliberate in what it does and not afraid of swimming against the ideological mainstream. With this ultimate focus on the community, I am trying to say that the Christian intellect and spirit cannot afford solipsism, to say, in other words, that I do not want to work and pray alone.

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