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Fredrik deBoer’s indictment of his fellow progressives is surprisingly relevant to a very different movement.
When and why I first started reading author and journalist Fredrik deBoer is beyond me. I wouldn’t have run into him in my usual ideological haunts: He’s an atheist; I’m a Christian. He’s—per his own description—a cradle Communist and a thoroughgoing leftist; I’m a political libertarian and temperamental conservative. We overlap on some policy and social critique, and I’ve found him thought-provoking on topics including preserving humanity in our digital age, the “tyranny of affirmation,” AI, and even Christian faith. But the gap between us remains wide.
It’s unsurprising, then, that deBoer’s second book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, was not written for a reader like me. Still, I found it useful on two levels. One is deBoer’s extension of his longstanding critique of his own political side, which offers insights that right-wing attacks tend to miss. The other is his assessment of what makes for a healthy and effective ideological movement. Though deBoer is interested in honing and advancing the cause of contemporary leftism, his analysis struck me over and over as applicable to a very different movement: American evangelicalism.
The spirit of 2020
The book starts with 2020, which DeBoer calls “a remarkable year” marked by “the spirit of possibility” for radical political change, even if it produced fairly few lasting policy shifts. “The term ‘reckoning’ was invoked again and again, and yet we don’t seem to have reckoned with any of our problems in any meaningful way,” deBoer argues. “What happened? This book is an attempt to answer that question.”
To that end, deBoer takes ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
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