September 22, 2025
By Charles Marsh
If a federal agent intent on advancing an ‘America First’ agenda in the nation’s universities were to review the syllabus of my undergraduate course the Kingdom of God in America, they might assume I was a reliable ally of the campus’s conservative minority. “Why the Woke Left Makes Nothing Happen” was the title of one section exploring the late 1960s countercultural movements.
Yet if they came to my classroom looking for MAGA-ready sound bites, they’d leave with little to show for it. While my course is unapologetically and pervasively Christian, being Christian is not synonymous with being politically conservative. Neither do the Christians I introduce throughout the semester resemble the “stupid white hippies”, so named by Stephen Miller, accused of blocking the road to American greatness. The Christians encountered in our readings and field trips and discussions represent a different cast of characters.
Some who have shaped the tradition of American Christian social reform are familiar —many who number among these righteous souls are less known: men and women like Walter Rauschenbusch, Howard Kester, Ella Baker, Rachel Carson, Mary Paik Lee, César Chávez, John Ryan, Sister Mary Stella Simpson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daniel Berrigan, and Lucy Randolph Macon, who, between the years 1900 and 1964, worked within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong, out of deep Christian conviction.
Consider also the intentional community called Koinonia Farm, founded in 1942 near the southwest Georgia town of Americus. The word koinonia comes from the Greek New Testament, meaning “fellowship,” “deep communion,” or “beloved community”.
Envisioned by Clarence Jordan, a New Testament scholar and Baptist minister, with his wife Florence and a cadre of fellow “Bible-believing Christians,” Koinonia sought to embody the teachings of Jesus with an unflinching, if not literal, clarity. In the Jim Crow South, this meant an interracial community of shared possessions, worship, and labor – a living example of the communal fellowship described in the New Testament Book of Acts that proved costly. Their witness drew hostility from neighbors, excommunication from local churches, and a season of Klan terrorism that left farmhouses riddled with buckshot and children traumatized.
Remaining steadfast in its calling, Koinonia’s scars attested to a stunning paradox: the most Christian region in the most Christian nation on earth had grown afraid of the religion of Jesus.
Throughout the 1960s, Koinonia would serve as a place of hospitality for human rights activists and southern dissidents. Civil rights workers too might stop in for a home-cooked meal, a hot shower, or a nap. Some years, as many as a thousand people came to the farm for the restorative powers of pecan groves and gospel music.
Out of these four hundred acres of red clay soil emerged one of the world’s most successful philanthropic initiatives. Among the visitors was a restless young millionaire named Millard Fuller. With the help of Clarence Jordan, Millard and his wife Linda developed the model of “partnership housing,” where families in need of decent shelter worked side by side with volunteers to build simple, affordable homes. Koinonia is the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity.
The faith-shaped tradition that gave rise to Koinonia and Habitat also inspired campaigns for the dignity of work, betterment in the care of the mentally ill, the civil rights movement, and organizing innovations such as the Southern Tenants Farmworkers Union, the YMCA and YWCA, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Not to be forgotten, the first generation of pro-life organizers were Roman Catholic Democrats committed to New Deal liberalism; adherence to natural law doctrine undergirded their support of the legal recognition of workers’ rights and protections for minorities, immigrants, and women.
These theological campaigns, and those who inspired them, exist like wild and crooked trees in the landscape of American political life. Their practitioners worship the God born homeless in a manger, sent “to proclaim good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, and to preach liberty to the captives.” They believe “in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light”, and the truth claims of historic Christian orthodoxy.
But you are unlikely to hear their praises sung at AmericaFest, CPAC, or Hillsdale College; nor are their names likely to appear in academic seminars on race theory or gender studies. Within the humanities and in scholarly literature, you will quite often find the tradition of American Christian social reform desacralized and absorbed into the study of American progressive movements. On this point, the MAGA right generally accepts the scholarly consensus—while going on to claim that progressive hopes such as universal healthcare, robust climate policy, enfranchisement for the formerly incarcerated, stricter gun safety polices, and a living wage are woke ideas and must be defeated.
If one hesitates to call this Christian tradition the “Left,” it might be because the reformers who achieved so much are more faithfully described as practicing what the evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock once named “public discipleship”—a Christian engagement with economic justice, political repression, racism, and militarism rooted not in secular ideology but in the Word and command of God. Their commitments, animated by caritas and eschatological hope, reflect a form of patriotic love that resists both idolatry and cynicism. The Project on Lived Theology has recently completed a two-volume biographical history of the Christian Left in the United States. To read these vivid theological lives is to encounter a form of Christian conviction that is at once Christ-centered and worldly.
Such “demonstration plots for the Kingdom”, as an early Koinonia gate sign read, offer us urgent lessons about the spiritual sources that of civil courage and responsible action. They resist easy assimilation into the polarized categories that dominate public life: the “woke” Left’s graceless dogmas, which reduce human beings to their injuries, identities, and privileges, often leaving no room for forgiveness or renewal; and the MAGA movement’s deliberate shrinking of American compassion.
The point is not that Christianity stands serenely above politics, but that its deepest commitments push against the certainties of both camps.
Where the woke or cultural Left too often traffics in shame, the Christian reform tradition is bound to the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. Where the MAGA Right peddles in fear and exclusion, the Christian reform tradition is radical in its demand for equity, unsentimental in its view of power, and unyielding in its call to holiness. Justice without grace curdles into cruelty, and conviction without curiosity into self-worship.
The witness of Koinonia, and of the many others who have followed, is no relic of a vanished past. We might speak of them as the unwoke Left. Pointing beyond the rituals of grievance and the liturgies of outrage, their charity, gentleness, and hands-to-the-plow realism are qualities we will surely need in the uncertain years ahead.